Home prices go higher in tight local, national markets

As in most of the country, housing in the Grand Coulee Dam area is in short supply, pushing prices high.

“It’s happening everywhere,” said longtime local broker Merle Kennedy of Foisy and Kennedy.

Nationally, prices on single family houses are up over 18 percent from a year ago, a trend that hold true in the Grand Coulee area, which Kennedy knows well.

Speaking at a Rotary Club online meeting March 23, Kennedy illustrated with a story:

A listing came up in the Northwest Multiple Listing Service on a Friday afternoon that he thought would interest a client. They viewed the property on Sunday and made an offer, along with three other hopeful buyers. It sold the next day.

Kennedy said he got a call from someone who had just sold a home on Whidbey Island about a property Kennedy had listed. The man wanted to travel here in a couple days to see it. He told him it likely wouldn’t last that long with multiple offers already on the table.

“It’s stressful for everyone,” he said.

Kennedy said the volume of sales has been consistent with other years — around 85-90 homes a year, but prices are up.

The median price of a sale has gone from about $155,000 a year ago to $215,000 now, he said. The lowest he found on the market was listed at $109,500, the highest at $750,000.

Fortune magazine says nationally home prices are up 18.8% from a year ago, higher than the 14 percent one-year jump they made in 2008, just before the housing bubble burst.

Locally that means more than just high mortgage payments. The short housing supply can also put a damper on the local economy.

“The challenge in our area is … rentals have been extremely difficult to find for a long time,” Kennedy noted.

On Wednesday, Kennedy said, there were eight houses listed for sale in the Grand Coulee Dam area, which he defines as within 15 miles of the dam.

That’s why Coulee Medical Center, which regularly brings in a variety of medical professionals to staff the hospital, keeps eight houses rented in order to have a place for them to live.

“It's an absolute struggle, because we've got so many people coming from outside the area and want to move here,” noted Heather McCleary of CMC’s human resources department. “But there's nothing available.”

Also in CMC’s HR department, Neshia Billups noted the hospital has 30-40 positions open, and the housing issue comes up often.

“Knowing that that's what the whole housing market looks like, … it's a conversation that we have often with our interview candidates [and] amongst us in HR in the hospital. We know that it's a problem in our area.”