King County Real Estate Market Update | November 2024

Hey y’all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my King County real estate market update for November, 2024. Well, as expected, the housing market here in King County is continuing to slow down, at least as far as the new listings are concerned, but that’s not the case when it comes to the close sales, the buyer activity, and even the pricing here in King County. Now, before we jump into this, I just want to highlight that we pass the presidential election finally after it always seems like almost an entire year at least, of marketing and commercials. And I mean, commercials are marketing right? To me, it’s a lot to process and to withstand for an entire year. I think it’s nice to have the closure that the election’s over and it’s interesting to see how the markets are responding, even with the just closure, having an answer for who the next president of the United States is going to be.

And with that, we’ll start talking about the housing market. And I think in King County we saw a normal drop off in listing activity in September. So the close to September, 2000 520 listings, new listings in King County as of the end of October, 1000 990. So more than 500 fewer listings month over month. This is normal, typically September, sometimes July. It just really depends. But a lot of times, September is the most amount of housing activity houses on the market or supply, and a lot of that is the kind of final push before the end of the year. October, we’re starting to see things slowing down. Historically pending sales activity remained about the same though last month, 1,828 pending sales 1,806 this last month, in fact, 45.6% up year over year. So considerably more pending sales this October than last October. Closed sales are also very similar.

We saw 1,388 last month, 1,788 this month, 31.2% up year over year. And we’re seeing the same trend of there’s way more buyer activity right now in October than there is seller activity, which is going to put a lot of pressure on the supply that we have, which will cause us to have fewer houses available. And that’s the trend we’re seeing. So we’ve seen looks like about 400 fewer houses available at the end of the month than there were last month. And the result is going from two point months of inventory or supply to 1.9 months of supply. And we’re getting into a place where once we start to get into the mid ones or closer to one, we’re going to have a lot more competition and it’ll put a lot more pressure on the prices. So last month houses sold for more than they did in September.

Looking at the average in the median sales price, houses sold for more on the median, slightly down on average. And that’s interesting given that we’re again continuing to trend towards the end of the year, houses are still taking about 25 days to sell, 23 last month. So not a lot of change there, but it’s interesting to see that that number is going up. Historically, we would see that number maybe staying the same or going down. Maybe it’s about the same, right? 9 65, 4 11 was our median sales price in King County, little below the high for the year. And the average $1,217,088. Last month it was 1,000,225. So again, tiny little drop off year over year though, 8.5% up on the median sales price, 7.2% up on the average sales price. And that is interesting given all that we’ve gone through over the past year and actually really the past couple years, seeing that the prices are now continuing to climb, right?

We’re up year over year and we’re up month over month, even for the month of October. So if we look back at, and I think we’re getting close to the end of the year here, but if we look back at the total averages for the year, if we were to put ’em all together, we’re up 10.3% year over year median sales price, the cumulative for the whole year, 9.5% up year over year. So really close to the 10% mark here in King County. And that’s with interest rates still right around 7%. There was a brief blip where we saw rates drop down just below six. You kind of hover around that, high fives, low sixes mark, and ironically, that’s before the fed drop rates, but we’ve talked about that too much here on this channel. So feel free to tune in to the weekly market watches that we do. And I talk a lot about what’s going on with interest rates, why rates have been going up versus down as the fed’s been dropping them. So if you have questions though about your situation, maybe you’re considering a purchase in King County here in the next year or so, same thing if you were thinking about selling. I’m happy to have a conversation with you, talk about strategy, talk about the market. And of course, if you’re getting value from this content and you’re following along, please consider subscribing so you can follow along on a regular basis.