Behind the Numbers: The Bryant Edition

Watch out Seattle, Bryant is moving on up!!!

Alyssa, my darling website copywriter, novelist, website guru and fabulous lady set up another neighborhood profile on my website after interviewing me for the content. So you may have guessed she and I were working on Bryant (check out the Bryan neighborhood page right here!).

So, I’m perusing the details and come across the last five years of median home prices. My assistant and partner Brian had sent the numbers over to Alyssa the day before. Alas, I did not see them at that point. But what does my eye see??? Bryant, in one year, saw median home values shoot up by $200,000. That was a 30% increase from $652,250 to $854,000. WOW.

What is causing this, you might ask? Why is Bryant so cool all of the sudden?

Well, the answer is twofold. Yes, Bryant is a lush, green, and charming little Seattle hood. You think you’re back in Mayberry as you walk down any one of the lush green, tree-lined sidewalks. The schools are top notch too, and shopping is sophisticated thanks to U-Village. Hell, the light rail even landed not far away in the Husky Stadium parking lot. Those are great reasons to believe buyers are flocking to Bryant. But I don’t think those can account for a 30% increase in one year…

Bryant is in the midst of a big change. You see, Seattle suffers from low to no selection of large modern homes. We have loads of good small modern homes, small old homes which require basement dwelling, and we have large old homes usually located in pretty primo neighborhoods (and with matching price tags). So buying a home with four bedrooms up, a master suite, and living spaces that actually fit the furniture for which they are designed are in real demand.

Bryant was and is the perfect place to start building what the public demands. Bryant was a working class neighborhood in the 1930s and 40s. So far, Bryant has been filled with cute little Cape Cod and craftsman homes atop 4000-5000 square foot lots. Well, those little houses do not fit the needs of today’s Seattleite. People are tearing down the older homes and putting up HUGE new homes that occupy nearly the entire lot. A nicely remodeled 150-square-foot, 1940 Cape Cod home in Bryant will grab about $650K these days. The new 3300-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 3-bath MEGA house will fetch $1,600,000 as of this year.

2016 sold more of these new MEGA homes in Bryant than in any other year. Thus accounting for the HUGE jump in median home prices. If you just looked at the big MEGA homes, you’d see that they jumped in value about $200,000 from 2015 to 2016. So that would indicate that Bryant saw a 12.5% increase, which is much more inline with reality.

That’s this episode of Behind the Numbers.

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