King County Real Estate Market Update | December 2021

Hey y’all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my King County Real Estate market update for December, 2021. If you’re new to these King County housing market updates, I typically start off by going through the stats briefly talking about a specific region in King County and then I talk about a little bit of application for the coming months. Let’s get started going through some of the stats here real briefly. And in this video I’ll also highlight the condos in King County. I try to do that on a quarterly basis just so you are staying up on and able to stay up on if you have a condo in King County, but I don’t focus on those mainly in this video as we go through the stats here, the number of new listings dropped dramatically from October to November and King County, not as much year over year, but we had a a 3.3% drop in listings year over year.

Not super surprised because last year more people were listing their homes during the holidays because they were waiting to put them on the market versus listing in the spring. If we look at pending sales, we saw an increase in pending sales, so we saw fewer new listings, 1,550, and we saw an increase in pending sales 2036, which means that we saw a decrease in the amount of homes for sale. So if we’re looking at single family homes across King County, we had over 1300 houses for sale last month at the end of the month. And as we’re looking at the data right now, we have 694 homes going into December to sell. Last month in King County, we had almost 1300 homes for sale. And as we look at the data for this month, we are sitting roughly around 700 homes for sale, a huge drop off, and that’s as a result of more homes coming off the market than coming on the market.

And if we look at the supply numbers, we’re seeing 0.3 months of supply, which is pretty much one week. And if we were to translate that, we’re seeing all the houses every week that come on the market selling. That’s pretty much what it means. There are a few stragglers, but if we were to look at all of the listings as a whole across King County, they’re all selling extremely quickly and that’s evidenced by the days on market as well. We’re seeing 13 days on market is the average. Last year we saw 18 days on market, so we’ve seen a decrease in the days on market across King County and in many of the hottest places in the county. We’re seeing that number closer to five or six days on market. We’ll wrap up the residential piece of the stats here, talking about median sales price and average sales price. And the median sales price in King County was $820,000 last month. That’s up 116% year over year. If we look at the average sales price in King County last month, we’re seeing $1,060,914. That’s super, super specific. That’s a 15.9% increase year over year. And again, I’ve pointed this out in some of my other videos. There’s a pretty large jump between the median sales price and the average sales price in King County almost actually, it’s more than $200,000 difference, which just means there are certain areas in King County that are a lot more expensive pulling up the average, but as a whole, there are a lot more affordable places in King County as well that are going to pull down that media number. So there’s just a big disparity in different locations between what it costs to buy a house in one location versus another. Let’s transition over to condos for those that want to pay attention here for a minute on the condo market.

But I just want to point out a few things here. We’ve seen a big drop off, 22.1% decline in the amount of new listings for condos, and we’ve also seen an uptick in pending sales 9.4%. What that means is we’re seeing less and less inventory. So we’re seeing right now a 63.6% decrease in condo inventory, which is really good for the condo market, at least for the sellers because we’re seeing home starts to sell above asking price again. So condos now on average in King County, were selling 1.5% above the asking price last year at this time, they were selling below asking price, and we were seeing about 2.2 months of supply. And that’s just, there’s more than enough condos to go around and a really a more normal and healthy market for buyers and sellers if we’re really honest. But right now we’re seeing that number back down to 0.6 months of supply.

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So it’s tightened up. It’s a lot more competitive. And sellers of condos are starting to see the benefits that maybe people in the residential space are feeling. So if you are somebody who is a condo owner, this may be the time. If you’ve got a place downtown Seattle or downtown Bellevue where the majority of the condos are, this is going to be the winter and spring to consider maybe selling your condo if you’ve been holding onto it through the little bit of a condo downturn. And surprisingly, even though the residential space was blowing up and everybody wanted a different house and needed a bigger house, the condos were experiencing the opposite. So now we’re starting to see the swing back, people moving back to the city, maybe looking at condos again and other options. So this might be a good time to get out from under that condo if you’ve been holding onto it countywide, the average sales price, $566,368, and the median sales price for condos across King County, 465,000. Now again, if you’re in Seattle

Or you’re in Bellevue, you’re going to see higher prices than you would see other places across King County. Let’s transition over to a county highlight. And in this month’s episode, we are going to highlight North King County. Now I get lots and lots of comments and I love it about, Hey, can you highlight my area? Can you highlight my city? And I love that, and I’ll continue to do my best to rotate through which parts of the county I highlight. I know that I don’t hit everybody every month. It’s not feasible for me in this video. It would be way too long. But in this video, I wanna highlight North King County that’s going to be Shoreline. Shoreline being one of the farthest north places in King County and very close to where I’m at in Edmonds. Shoreline’s median sales price, 760,000 up 14% year over year.

Shoreline’s also seeing about three and a half percent over asking price on average. It’s kind of mirrors Seattle in a lot of ways as far as the competition, so not quite as competitive as over on the east side of King County. If we jump over to Lake Forest Park, also in North King County, we’re seeing an increase of 22.3% in the median sales price, 920,500. A lot of money to live in Lake Forest Park. Homes are selling on average 9.5% above the asking price. And again, 0.4 months of supply. So super, super tight inventory in Lake Forest Park. We’re gonna jump over to Ken Moore now, and Ken Moore saw a million sales price of over a million dollars, $1,053,750, and that’s a 27.7% jump in median sales price year over year on average. Houses in Kenmore are selling 7% above asking price, and there is 0.1 months of supply in Kenmore.

So super, super tight inventory. It’s just like Bellevue in Kirkland. We’re seeing really, really tight inventory as well. Point two months of supply houses in Kirkland are selling on average 12.3% over asking price. Super, super competitive houses are selling on average in Kirkland. Again, median number is what I use in these videos. $1,267,500. That’s a huge jump again in Kirkland, 23.4% up year over year. If we bounce over a little bit farther east to Woodenville, we’re seeing a huge jump there. 25.1% up year over year, $1,327,500. And that’s 12.3% over asking price in Woodenville as well. And we’re seeing that same really tight 0.2 months of supply. So across North King County, and I’m not counting Bothel if some of you are feeling slighted here, Bothel is also in Hummish County and Snohomish County just doesn’t have as many cities. So I bump Bothel into Snohomish County. There are some parts of Bothel in both, but in this video we’ve covered the majority of North King County and it’s relatively similar outside of Shoreline. Super, super competitive, super, super low inventory. You can see that if you’re able to recall what we just talked about, that the farther east you get and closer to Bellevue, you get the higher the price, the more competitive and the lower the inventory. So what’s gonna happen in King County, as we wrap up 2022, I suspect that we are going to continue to see a steep decline in new listings. We’re going to continue to see people buying up the houses that are coming on the market. And as we look towards 2022, I suspect we’re gonna go into the new year with record low amounts of homes to sell record high numbers of buyers.

And I really do think as we head into 2022, that we’re gonna continue to see home is increasing. And it may to some seem like it’s really hard to imagine, but there’s nothing right now that seems to be stopping this train. I do think, I do think that this is unsustainable, and people ask me, how long can this go on? It’s really hard to say, but right now, when you have 15, 20 buyers for every house and as a seller’s agent and buyer’s agent, but on the seller’s side, I see regularly many buyers that are highly qualified and able to go even higher than the prices they’re paying until something shifts like interest rates or demand, or there’s all of a sudden a flood of inventory, which I just don’t imagine that happening. We’re going to continue to see prices climbing in King County. Thanks so much for watching my King County real estate market update for December, 2021. If you made it to the end of this video, I know that you got some value, so please, if you haven’t already, subscribe to my channel. If you want to engage with me, I’d love it when people do. I’d love to see some comments down below and I will engage back. And number three, if you are somebody who’s thinking about buying or selling in King County, I would love to hear from you.