In the Wenatchee Real Estate market, you have to be careful about too many statistics.  I actually took a statistics class or two back at UW many years ago, and we learned about something called sample size.  Basically, if you don't have a lot of  pieces to measure and slice and dice, it is hard to come up with statistics that mean anything.  In Seattle, you can study trends; in Wenatchee, one good weekend of home sales can skew the numbers.  It is best to look at the overall picture to see what is happening in Wenatchee Real Estate.

In Wenatchee, we have two markets, the locals and the Doctors/retirees/second home market.  People retiring from Puget Sound and moving to the sunshine have more money to spend and buy/build nicer more expensive homes.  People who work in the fruit industry or as medical staff etc are not usually buying those homes, they are buying something more in line with their income. 

Short term, we have an oversupply in certain market segments, but this is correcting itself as builders are not starting new spec homes to add to the supply. The over supply is really above the $350K price level; at prices below this, there is generally only a 5-7 month inventory.   So the over supply is in the more expensive homes, that may be painful if you are trying to sell one of these today, but long-term, these more expensive homes are where the demand will be.

The reason the demand will be there is the same demographic story: as baby boomers in the Puget Sound area retire, they start to notice that there are only 58 clear days a year in Seattle. And with their new found free time they visit the Wenatchee, Leavenworth, Chelan, or Winthrop areas and discover open spaces, no traffic, small town atmosphere, and a glowing orb in the sky that makes everything look pretty and feels warm.  A certain percentage of these people will decide to move here.

Currently, we are slowed down a bit as these Seattlites and Eastsiders are having trouble selling their homes, however, the Puget Sound economy doesn't get hit as hard as the rest of the country in times of downturn, because someone has to build those 787 jets that the Arabs can afford to buy, and Microsoft continues to be the 9th largest country in the world.

So I expect we will see some slowness continue this year as people are a little shell shocked with the recent inflation. By next year the price of flying will be outrageous, and a weekend trip to Chelan will make more sense than a vacation in California, and the migration from rain to sunshine will renew.