Median house, condo prices down in September

The median price of a single-family house sold in King County slipped to $415,000 last month, the lowest price in more than two years.

The Northwest Multiple Listing Service, which tracks sales, says the last time the median price was lower was in March 2006. Median means half of homes sold for more, half for less.

A year ago, in September 2007, houses in King County were selling for a median price of $450,000, the service said. The one-year price drop is 7.78 percent.

But that's an improvement over August, when the year-over-year drop hit double digits — more than 11 percent — for the first time. Some say the local real-estate market peaked in August 2007, and brokers had been predicting year-over-year performance would start to improve — or at the least the declines would be smaller — in September.

The median condo-sale price in King County in September fell 9.3 percent from a year earlier, from $299,900 to $272,000, the service said.

Closed sales in September were down more than 25 percent.

Sifting through the bad news, real-estate agents found a hope in a 4 percent year-over-year increase in the number of total pending house and condo sales. That suggests there could be an increase in closed sales when numbers are come in for this month and November.

In Snohomish County, the median sale price of a house fell 9.7 percent, to $332,000, the MLS said, while the median condo price was up 2.5 percent over September 2007, to $246,000.