Price Cuts Are Landing Hardest in the Territory's Most Expensive Zip Code

In the week of August 24, sellers in the territory's priciest zip code cut prices at a rate no other zip code matched, even though three of the five zip codes didn't close enough sales this window to post a median sale price at all.

Here's the read for the week of August 24: this territory still favors sellers overall, with 2.50 months of supply on hand and a typical listing spending 33 days on market. But at the top of the price range, that leverage is already slipping. Zip code 51108, the most expensive market in the territory at a $542,500 median list price, saw 4 of its 10 active listings take a price cut this week. No other zip code comes close to that on a relative basis.

Compare that with 51106, the volume market. It carries 113 active listings, more than eleven times what 51108 has on the shelf, yet only 14 of them took a cut this week. 51054 logged 2 cuts against 20 active listings. 51109 logged 2 cuts against 12 active. 51001, the smallest pool in the territory at 6 active listings, saw just 1 cut. Scale each zip code's cuts to the size of its own inventory, and 51108 stands alone.

Two of those 51108 cuts are large enough to put a number on. 31632 Hedge Ave came down $20,000, to $505,000, after just 18 days on market. 3902 Smith River Rd dropped $12,000, to $600,000, after 32 days. These aren't listings that sat untouched for a year before someone gave up on the number. One of them adjusted inside three weeks.

Here's the catch on this story: you can't confirm whether that recalibration is showing up in closed prices anywhere except 51106 and 51108. This week, 51001 closed 3 sales, 51054 closed 1, and 51109 closed 2, all below the volume needed to support a median sale price, so none of the three returns one. Only 51106 (46 sold, $235,950 median sale price) and 51108 (8 sold, $288,188 median sale price) have a price read at all right now. The cuts in 51108 are easy to see in raw counts. Whether sellers elsewhere are following the same script is a question three-fifths of the map can't yet answer.

Zoom out and the territory logged 60 sales and 23 price cuts against 161 active listings over the four weeks ending August 30. 51108 alone accounts for 4 of those 23 cuts while holding only 10 of the 161 active listings, a far bigger footprint in the cut column than in the inventory column.

If you're selling in 51108, or anywhere near that price point, treat these cuts as information you get for free before you list, not a surprise you find out about after. Four cuts out of ten active listings is a market telling you where buyers' heads are at. Pricing to the number the pool is already showing you beats pricing to what the zip code looked like a month ago.

If you're buying anywhere in the territory, the top of the price range is where the negotiating room is opening up first. The Hedge Ave cut arrived after 18 days on market, not after months of sitting unsold. That is the plainest evidence available right now of what a seller in this price band will actually move on, and it arrived early.

What to watch from here: whether 51001, 51054, and 51109 close enough sales to post a median price of their own, which would tell us if the recalibration in 51108 is a top-of-market story or a territory-wide one. And whether 51108 keeps outpacing its neighbors on cuts once more of this month's activity closes, or whether this week was the peak of it. Michelle keeps this list zip code by zip code, every week, for exactly that reason.