As some of you may know, the regions in the MLS do not correspond well to neighborhoods as we who live in them traditionally know. For instance, you may be curious to know the median or average price of a home in the Lochmoor neighborhood of Bellevue. You won’t find Lochmoor in the dropdown of neighborhoods either on any real estate web site or on the MLS.
First, although I will give directions on how to do this yourself, any agent should be able to get you this information. Yes, they cannot search for it directly on the MLS, but if you really want to know this and she can’t tell you – then your agent is lazy – plain and simple.
However, if you would like to do this yourself the following is one way to do it.
- First, determine what the exact boundaries are for the neighborhood. Sometimes you may not care what the boundaries actually are, but you care that you live within such a street and such a street. This procedure will work for that too, but you need to know the exact boundaries.
- Go to the John L Scott web site.
- Zoom in to the area you care about. Do not enter any pricing restrictions – though for other statistics this might be interesting (average square footage for a given price range).
- You’ll see two checkboxes for active and sold homes. You want to make sure that the active checkbox is unchecked and the sold checkbox is checked.
5. Next, click on the ‘Draw your boundaries’ button and follow the instructions to draw boundaries around your area.
6. You will see a list of properties. If you want the median house price it is very easy to determine it. Take the total number of properties, divide by two, then look at that property number. It’s price will be the median (assuming you did not change the sorting order from the default of sort by price).
7. If you want to know the average price, you’ll need to do a bit more work. First, change the dropdown to show as many properties on the screen as possible, then drag your mouse and select all of the properties. Make sure to drag all of the way down through the scroll bar.
8. Now (assuming you are using a PC), press CTRL+C. This copies the text.
9. Open Excel or some other similar spreadsheet program and start a new document.
10. Press CTRL+V to paste the data into the spreadsheet.
11. You can now do a variety of different statistics. If you want the average price, just select the cell below the list of prices and set it to calculate the median price.
For instance, in this example I set it to =Median(D1:D15).
There you have it. If you have would prefer to have someone to do this for you and you are looking for a house in Seattle or the East Side, I would be happy to look this up for you!
