I had occasion last week to do some digging for short sale listings in West Bellevue – the NWMLS area 520, west of I-405 and north of I-90 including  Beaux Arts, Enatai, Medina, Clyde Hill, plus Hunts Point, and Yarrow Point on the north side of Hwy 520.

I wondered whether the new NWMLS listing fields to indicate short sale or bank-owned/REO would help – they didn’t; it only showed 3 hits.  So just for fun I went back and did it the drudge way.  There were 313 active listings for single family homes.  I scanned through the agent summaries for each looking for “subject to lienholder approval” or some similar phrase.   I found 32 listings that were short sale, about 10% of the total, and 5 that were bank owned, less than 2% of the total.  So 1) as we knew, there are a lot of short sales going on, and 2) there is very little use so far of the new fields.  So add this to the previous good post that Jillayne  did before the new fields were added by the MLS.

Some other interesting observations out of this little study – this is a relatively high-priced area: 68% of the listings are over $1 million.  But 67% of the short sales are under $1 million.

And last of all, since Sunday, 4 of those shorts have gone under contract – sounds like a pretty good absorption rate; I’ll track them for a while and post an update later.