Seattle Real Estate Market Update | June 2018
Here are my latest thoughts on the Seattle Real Estate Market:
Home prices in Seattle and the surrounding areas should level off over the next month-or-two. More homes will come for sale, so fewer people will be competing for the same homes.
[Video transcript of June 2018 Seattle Real Estate Market Update]
Hey, you all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent here with Real Property Associates. I’ve got my June monthly market update for you, and also a fun success story coming up.
I want to start off with a story, just like I do for every other market update, and this story is a story based on some friends from church. They bought a house with me. They closed two weeks ago, and these are some friends that, when we met the first time, we talked about what they wanted, where they wanted to live, their budget, and we thought maybe they would be compromising a lot more than they wanted to and potentially not even able to buy a house.
Really quick story: We were able to get them into a loan program. It was a low down payment loan program that actually expired a few weeks after they purchased their home. The home we found, I believe it was their first offer, if I remember correctly. After looking at some other ones, we went for this house. We maxed out on their budget. We went to the top of what they were willing to spend on this house. We ended up being the lowest of three offers on the house. We were beat out by $15,000 and $20,000 on the other two offers, and the seller chose our offer, and I don’t know why. But the seller chose our offer, and they’re now homeowners.
Super excited for those friends. If they’re watching this, congratulations, high fives, awesome for you. But just another fun part of the job and another testimony that sometimes it’s not always the price and the highest price that gets you a house. And also an encouragement for you, if you’re a buyer or you know somebody thinking about buying soon, there’s hope, and there are opportunities to get a house that you like in the area that you like, if you’re willing to be patient and maybe compromise a little bit on your priorities.
Now, for what you’re actually watching this for, if you’re a homeowner or a home buyer, potential home buyer, I think these stats are going to be important for you now. The couple I want to focus on, median sales price, everybody wants to know that. If you’re a homeowner, you’re like, “What’s my house worth? Is it still going up? Is it still going down?” Last month, in the city of Seattle, we actually saw a slight drop in the median sales price, but not much, just to about $800,000, which is literally a couple thousand lower from last month when we set a new record.
The city of Lynnwood and the city of Shoreline also set new median sales price records. We’re seeing prices in the area still going up. I think what we’re going to see, maybe this month, we’ll see one more bump in the median sales price for the year in the area, and then what we’re going to start to see, if it’s going to be like it has the last few years, we’re going to start to see a little bit of a leveling off this summer, and maybe even a dip as we head into the end of the year. That’s what we’ve seen in the last few years, and I think we might see that again in 2018.
The other thing that’s interesting to note, we saw the most new listings come on. We saw the most amount of pending sales. We saw the most amount of homes sold, and we also saw, at the end of the month, the most amount of homes still for sale. What that means is that we have more inventory available for the buyer pool. What that doesn’t mean is it’s going to get easier to buy a house. But the good news is that there are more homes for sale on the market right now.
A couple of news items that I think are interesting before we kind of get into the application. It was Trulia, I think this was reported in Geek Wire, if I remember correctly, Trulia did a study, and they’re a subsidiary of Zillow at this point, that was essentially tracking from a time that a house goes onto their site from the time that it’s taken off or sold, what that time frame is in different cities. The city of Seattle was the top-rated city as far as the time, the fastest to sell at 36 days. There were a couple other cities tied with Seattle from the time that you list to the time that you sell. The city of Seattle was also rated as, and this was in the Seattle Times, the fastest growing large city in the U.S. for the whole decade.
Now, let’s go to the application really quick before we wrap this up. If you’re a homeowner, I think your home values are going to continue to climb, and I’ve been talking about this for a while, for the next couple years as people continue to move to the area. According to the lenders that I know and talk to, people can afford it, for the prices to keep going up. I know some of you might be feeling the tension and the squeeze, but there are still people that can afford these prices to be going up. Expect for people to be moving to the area and still buying your houses and paying a premium.
Now, if you’re a home buyer, I think the application for you here is these next couple months, as we go into the summer, specifically more August, September, these are going to be a time where you’re going to see inventory continue to come onto the market, so more new homes for sale. I think these numbers that I was mentioning, the most amount of homes for sale, things like that, I think that’s going to continue for the next few months. This is going to be a good opportunity for you to get into the market and have a little bit more options.
With all the buyers in the market, it’s nice to have more houses because that means there’s a little less competition in upward price pressure, which is kind of why you see a little bit of a slow-down here in these next few months. Expect to be able to have a better opportunity now, so if you are thinking about buying, you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, this is going to be the time for you to do that.
Now, before I wrap up, I just want to again say thank you for watching these. I really appreciate your attention. If you’re watching these videos, and you watch these on a regular basis, or maybe you just stumbled upon it, I’d love for you to engage with my channel here. If you’re a regular and you haven’t subscribed, please give it a thumbs-up. If you found value in this video, I’d appreciate a like and maybe even some comments down below. I love to engage with people. I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.
Thanks for watching. We’ll give you another one of these next month. Until then, bye for now.
Oh, hey, and as a P.S. I forgot to put this into my update, but I wanted to add it in here at the end: The city of Seattle, about a month ago, passed a head tax on large businesses making over, I think it was $20 million. Don’t quote me on that number though. The city of Seattle yesterday, as of now that I’m recording this video, the day before, actually repealed that head tax, so they’re not going to be charging these large companies. It was a per employee head tax.
There was a lot of concern about that causing companies in Seattle, specifically Amazon as the main one, to move out of the city, so it’s nice to see that overturned. A lot of big companies got involved with this. I didn’t think it was going to be a big issue, but it’s definitely not going to be an issue at this point. So, good news.
