Zillow pinpoints real estate hot spots

A steady stream of potential buyers flowed through a big Craftsman house a couple of blocks from Green Lake on Sunday, apparently undeterred by its $695,000 asking price.

The house went on the market Aug. 8, but listing agent Mark DeSpain of Windermere Real Estate was not taking offers until today. He was expecting to get several.

"There was a time in the last couple years when you could get away with (waiting a week to accept offers) in almost any neighborhood," DeSpain said. Now, he said, it's possible only in certain high-demand areas.

DeSpain is backed up by new estimates released Monday by the Seattle online real-estate company Zillow. com for the first quarter of 2006.

Zillow pegged the median home value in Green Lake at $521,916 in June -- up by an annualized rate of 32.2 percent from three months earlier, compared with 16.5 percent for the city as a whole. Broadview, Wedgwood, Westlake and Windermere were up by an annualized rate of more than 40 percent.

Zillow showed much lower appreciation in some other city neighborhoods, and even declines in Broadway and downtown. But the city's overall number was still impressive compared with the national increase of 6 percent.

"The market's still strong, particularly in desirable neighborhoods like Green Lake," DeSpain said.

"Green Lake is hot, hot, hot right now," said Susan Ryan, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Bain. "The amount of money that people are willing to pay to live in Green Lake boggles the mind."

Gas prices and traffic are driving up interest in houses close to amenities, and the desirability is feeding on itself, Ryan said. "It is the perception that this is where people want to be," she said.

Dennis Koepke, an associate broker with Windermere, said he listed a Broadview home for $775,000 last month and sold it for $888,000. He saw steady interest Sunday in a Jackson Park house listed at $640,000.

"Well-priced homes are still getting multiple offers," he said.

One shopper at DeSpain's open house, who didn't want her name used for fear her desperation would hurt her search, said places she's seen in two months of hunting either had something wrong with them or several other suitors willing to pay $60,000 to $80,000 above the list price.

"Every weekend, it's kind of a mad dash to see as many as we can see," she said.

Zillow just introduced a series of planned quarterly reports on home values in five areas: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and South Florida. Zillow spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky said the company is sitting on "a mountain of data about millions of homes" and wanted to present some of the interesting trends that emerge from slicing and dicing the data.

People who follow the local real-estate market generally rely on statistics from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Bohutinsky said Zillow's report provides a more "comprehensive" market snapshot because it considers every home in a neighborhood, not just those sold through the MLS.

"We take the patterns we see in current sales and apply them to all homes, regardless of whether they sold or not," Bohutinsky said, adding that Zillow's system rules out inconsistencies that may occur if an inordinate number of high-end or low-end homes sold during a set period.

Bohutinsky said company officials have no intention of selling the data. The intent is "just to provide more free and interesting information about home values."

P-I reporter John Cook contributed to this report. P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen can be reached at 206-448-8362 or aubreycohen@seattlepi.com.

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