Biggest Discounts July Update

Let’s check in on our stats once again and find out where buyers are currently getting the biggest discounts off asking price. If you are a potential buyer, this will help you to know which neighborhoods may be softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from last month in the Seattle area (King/Snohomish/Pierce) and sorted it by city/town. We calculated the overall difference between the sale price and the list price. Note that this reflects the final list price, after all price drops in the listing. Any areas with fewer than ten sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings, but interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

The overall discount rate dropped from May to June, moving from 4.1% to 3.5%. Kirkland dropped completely out of the top ten, falling from 11.1% off in May to 9.8% in June. Mercer Island moved up from #2 to #1.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

Of the 52 areas we ranked, only Lake Stevens came in in with an average sale price above the average list price.

Here’s an added bonus. The following chart shows the top ten areas with the largest overall discount from the original list price, instead of the final list price:

Technically, Mercer Island’s average discount off original list was far higher than shown above, but the stat was being massively skewed by a single sale that was originally listed just under $30 million, but sold for “just” $15.6 million, which I removed from the data set.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and hit the “FullSummary” sheet.

Of the 3,507 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 216 homes (6%) sold for 10% or more off the asking price, while 93 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.