After seven years of married life in a 1,500-square-foot Battle Ground house, Casey and Jenni Holyk are ready to spread out to a larger family home with acreage where they can raise their two young children.
As part of a resurgence of Clark County move-up buyers, the Holyks are banking on the equity of their three-bedroom ranch (purchased in 2003 for $170,000) to help them transition into a bigger place. They’ve listed the home for $190,000, below the $230,000 they might have sought at the height of the local real estate market. Even at that lower asking price, they expect to make a profit, Casey Holyk said.
“We can buy so much more house than we could have two years ago,” said Holyk, 35, a manager for a dealer-only auto auction company in Portland.
More local buyers are starting to share Holyk’s philosophy, according to real estate agents and builders who say the trend is reflected in Clark County’s June home-selling statistics. This uptick, and decisions made by families such as the Holyks, could be early signs of Clark County’s economic recovery.
Better here
Unlike in much of the nation, Clark County home sales have been climbing steadily for months. Nationally, new-home construction was down 5 percent from June 2009 to the same month this year. Locally, it was up 142 percent. June was the tenth month in a row of year-over-year gains in Clark County home sales, according to preliminary figures from “benchmarks,” which tracks every home sold in the county. There were 640 new and pre-owned homes sold in June, up from 583 home sales in May and from 544 units sold in June 2009.
New and pre-owned
in June
Year Units
2010 640
2009 544
2008 478
2007 813
2006 1,041
SOURCE: Riley & Marks benchmarks report
Although many of the local sales can be traced to buyers rushing to close before a June 30 deadline for the federal home-buyer’s tax credit (recently extended to September), a significant portion of the June sales were move-up buyers jumping off the fence, said Mike Lamb, a real estate broker who works for Windermere/Stellar Group in Vancouver.
He attributed the trend to home prices driven down by the market’s two-year slump but said he is also seeing more optimism from buyers.
People who had been hunkering down now feel more confident about purchasing a home, Lamb said. “People are recognizing that if they want to change houses, this is a good time to do that because the values are so low and the interest rates are good.”
Mortgage rates reached record-breaking lows this week, diving to a low of 4.25 percent for a 30-year fixed mortgage and 3.75 percent for a 15-year fixed mortgage, reported LendingTree’s Weekly Mortgage Rate Pulse, a snapshot of the lowest and average mortgage rates available within the LendingTree network of lenders.
The rates have spurred local sales of new homes, which are now priced well below their one-time highs.
“They (buyers) were kind of waiting and now they seem ready to go,” said Laura Bellcoff, a marketing supervisor for Vancouver-based New Tradition Homes.
Belcoff called most new-homebuyers “definitely move-up buyers. They are coming in at our higher end,” buying houses in the $400,000 to $450,000 price range,” she said.
Welcome sight
After two years of sluggish sales, the return of move-up buyers is a welcome sight, said Yvonne Lee, a Vancouver Realtor who specializes in selling high-end houses.
She has seen more buyers looking for houses on acreage, an attempt to take advantage of the significant drop in land values over the last two years. Prices fell up to 30 percent.
She expects a notable uptick in sales at least through August because people prefer to move before the school season starts, said Lee, an agent with Coldwell Banker Barbara Sue Seal.
But because move-up buyers are also sellers, they must get beyond the sense that they’re losing money on the home they may have watched rise and then drop in value, said Kale Dunning, the Holyk’s Vancouver broker with Coldwell Banker.
“In this market, I have to ask about 20 minutes worth of questions before I can even advise” a prospective client, Dunning said, adding that client counseling sessions start with assessing the homeowner’s equity situation.
To Mike Lamb, the reappearance of move-up buyers puts Clark County another step closer to housing recovery. Lamb said sales signal that the market is slowly being purged of distressed and bank-owned properties.
“Historically, a seller becomes a buyer, but banks aren’t buyers,” Lamb said.
