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Seattle Housing Crisis! Why Don’t We Just Build More Homes??

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I’m Sean Reynolds from Summit Properties Northwest and Reynolds & Kline Appraisal and a question I get asked a lot is, or I hear people ask a lot is why don’t we just build some more houses? And the bottom line is, in economic terms, that the housing market is super inelastic, meaning when you identify that you need to have a certain number of homes here, it takes you like two years, possibly three years to actually get those homes built. So, the Seattle market has been continually behind on its matter between demand and supply of housing. So we know that we need a ton more homes, but to get them through the pipeline is just basically a debacle right now. So you’ve got permitting, you’ve got development, you’ve got government regulations that kind of all hinder this. You’ve got to have all the infrastructure to get all this housing from raw land or tear downs into fully finished.

You’ve got to figure out the utilities. Can we get enough water, enough power, the roadways, we’ve already got gridlocked roads. How are we going to make all this work for what’s already a congested area? Seattle is already congested, we don’t have enough roadways. We don’t have enough public transportation. We’ve got a light rail system that’s coming, but in 2025 and we’re already jammed up before that. So, all of these factors kind of go into why we don’t have enough housing and it’s because housing takes so long to get from the planning stage to actually being done and built for the consumer. So you’ve got a lot of consumers going, let’s just build some more houses. Great. That’s an awesome plan. But it takes forever and that’s why we are basically now seeing the homes built that we identified a bunch of years ago, when our demand was even less than now we know, ok, we really need a ton more housing in the greater Seattle market.

How are we going to make that happen? Well, we plan as best we can and then build accordingly and we end up with whatever homes we’ve got. So, until we play catch up and have the market slow down a little bit, you’re going to see fewer homes being built than we really need and that’s just kind of where we’re at.

I’m Sean Reynolds from Summit Properties Northwest and Reynolds & Kline Appraisal. I appreciate you watching the video. I would love to have you subscribe to our youtube channel or comment or put into questions some other ideas of videos you’d like to see in the future because I’m more than happy to shoot more video on these, these kinds of topics. Again, thanks for watching the video, bye.

Sean Reynolds

Sean Reynolds

The Owner and Designated Managing Broker of Summit Properties NW and Reynolds & Kline Appraisal.

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