Seattle Real Estate Market Update | July 2018
Housing inventory in Seattle and the surrounding areas is the highest we have seen in a few years, but that is not saying much. The Seattle real estate market still heavily favors sellers.
[Video transcript of July 2018 Seattle Real Estate Market Update]
Hey, Zach McDonalds, you’re real estate agent here with Real Property Associates. This is my July monthly market update. If you’re new, I start off each update with a story. I’m going to start here with a story of my most recent listing that sold and that’s a home in the North Beach neighborhood. It’s a little bit northwest of Ballard. I met the seller. I met him playing basketball, actually, at the Shoreline Community Center. Basketball is one of the things that I really enjoy doing in my free time, it’s a great workout. For the last 3 1/2 years, I’ve been playing basketball with Myron in the mornings. He approached me, it was about four months ago now, telling me that it’s time to sell the family home.
We met together, decided to list it. We got the photos, the video, the 3D tour, we got all the marketing done, you’re ready to go. We were actually just waiting for some construction to finish up on the backstreet. The next-door neighbor’s daughter contacted us and said, “Hey, we really would like to buy this house. We have good memories here, our parents live next door.” After some negotiation and a couple of different offers that they made, they decided that it was too good to pass up. We actually took the offer before I even got to market it.
It was a big bummer for me because I like to do the marketing, I like to try to drive in the competition, but it ended up being a really big win-win for everybody. They got a good price for the house specifically looking at some of the other sales, and they just felt really good about it because they knew the neighbors, they grew up next door to the neighbor, so it was a big win-win for everybody.
Now, the part that you all really care about or maybe like the stories best but a lot of you like the stats. I did a video yesterday, and I’ll link it up and that is is the market slowing down? In the last few months, we’ve seen inventory numbers go up a little bit. That just means that more homes have been listed than they have in the past. We started to see more homes come on the market and we also, in the last few months, have seen fewer homes selling so you have … what happens in that instance is you have more supply than you had previously.
Our supply numbers are still really low, so we’re still months of no sales at all to really get to a more healthy supply number, but there’ve been talks of the market slowing down, it does every summer. It slowed down a little bit earlier this year, and so there are people that are a little concerned about that. I’m not concerned about it and I talk about that one might my video that I linked up.
It always happens. In 2016, we actually talked about the same things. I heard the buzz around the office, and specifically the people that have been around for 25, 30 years like there’s just no way this is going to keep going, this is the end, we’re never going to see multiple offers and bidding wars again, and then here we are the last couple of years.
My personal conviction is that we’re going to see the normal seasonal slowdown and then we’re going to start to pick up again come the early, early winter time, like late winter early spring. That’s my predictions about it. A few numbers that you might be interested in. The median sales price is still up in Seattle about 7% from this time last year, but that is less than the record-setting pace that we’ve been at. What happens when there’s more supply and less demand? Less demand, you start to see the prices level out a little bit, makes sense, right?
Come on, 7% is still great … a lot of appreciation. It’s not crazy. It’s not something that makes the news necessarily, but it’s still really solid. A few things that we did see, we saw the amount over asking price go down which makes sense. You have more homes so fewer buyers are competing for those homes. The noteworthy things I think to talk about too here are the median sales price.
I think the reason I’m not concerned here, one of the big reasons is because … well, two things. First of all, the median sales price last month in the city of Seattle was $462 per square foot which is the price per square foot, sorry, the median price per square foot. The highest it’s ever been, highest it’s ever been. People are still getting the top dollar for their square footage on their house.
Homes are still selling in the average 7 to 8 days depending on if you’re in Seattle or shoreline, [inaudible 00:04:27]. It’s not like homes are taking forever to sell and the people, the prices are going low. What I think has happened, and this is another one of my hunches is that buyers have gotten more selective. The house sits on the super busy road or behind a strip club isn’t selling in six days with 10 offers because people are like, “I need to get a house, I’m going to miss out.”
I think buyers have realized that they’re not going to miss out. there’s going to be an opportunity for them. Specifically the buyers I’m working with right now, don’t have that same sense of urgency that I saw over the last few years. They’re still serious, they still want to buy a house, they’re still approved and qualified, but they’re not in a hurry to buy just a house. They want to buy a house that they want to live in. My wife and I went through it like a year and a half ago, the same experience, but we were the one like every week we made an offer, every single week until we got a house.
We look back and every time we pass one of those houses were like, “I’m so I didn’t get that house”, because we were in that same mentality, “don’t want to miss out, don’t want to miss out”. But we’re glad we got the house we got. What we should’ve done is not made an offer on any of those houses and just made an offer on the one we like. But people feel that pressure, “Well, if I don’t get the … if I make an offer and 10 other people like I might not get it, and that’s the hard part, that’s the tension.
Buyers aren’t giving into that as much right now is what I’ve seen. That coupled with listing agents and sellers I think, so sellers this is for you or homeowners, you push the price and push the price and push the price and eventually get to a spot where buyers are like, I’m going to wait on this one and see what happens”. We’re getting to that spot where buyers are being a little bit more selective and sellers are still pushing the price as I talked about and we’re kind of it that like, “What’s going to give?”
I think we’re just going to see a little bit as we have. Prices are going to level out. They might go down a little bit. It’s hard to say prices are going down. They always do this time of year a little bit because there’s more selection. But I think, as we head into the new year, even into the fall again, we’re going to start to see a little bit of a pick up again, in the prices.
That’s my predictions. I wouldn’t be worried though. That’s the big message today, don’t be worried. if you have questions about the market or you want to talk a little bit more about your individual situation, I’d love to be a resource for you. You can either if you’re watching this on Facebook, you can contact me via the contact button or you can, if you’re on YouTube or somewhere else, you can find my contact information and go ahead and reach out to me that way. Thank again for watching, and we’ll have another one of these for you next month.
