King County Real Estate Market Update | January 2022

Hey y’all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my King County real Estate market update for January, 2022. First update of the year. Can’t believe 2021 is behind us here, but there’s a lot to look forward to in 2022 at least that’s how I’m looking at it. And as I’m looking at the data here, I want to do what we typically do in these updates. So these King County updates are typically a little bit more numbers focused, a little less story focused, but I want to talk about year to date kinda year over year numbers. So sum up 2021, talk about the year over year numbers for December and also just share a few thoughts for where I think we’re headed in 2022. Let’s start off with looking at last year. So if we’re looking at King County for all of last year, so this is January through December, we saw a 2.6% increase in new listings.

So we actually had more houses that were listed in 2021. Then in 2020 we saw an 8.3% increase in pending sales. So we saw a smaller increase in new listings, but we saw more houses go pending in 2021 and we saw an even bigger jump, 12.6% jump in closed sales, which we’ve been talking about the inventory number, the supply number, and I think that’s a big reason why we’ve seen such a decline in the supply number. Last year, at the end of 2020 we had about 0.5 months of homes on the market, which really is super, super low historically and across the nation one of the lowest, if we’re looking at this December, we’re ending at 0.2 months of supply, which is even lower. So when you think it can’t get any more competitive, well I’ve got news for you, I think 2022 is going to at least at the beginning be even more competitive than 2021.

A few more stats here as we wrap up this section talking about 2021, we saw over the year an average of an 8 32 median sales price and that was for the whole year average together. and that was a 14.8% jump year over year. So last year we saw 7 25 across King County as the average for the whole year and this year we saw 8 32, so pretty substantial jump countywide and we saw a 20.4% jump in the average price. Okay, so there was a little bit more of a jump in some of the higher end homes. So we’re seeing a little bit more of a gap here between the average and the median. I’ve talked about this jump or the, the difference between the average in the median being quite pronounced in the King County market and I think a big part of that’s because of Seattle. So Seattle’s pulling down that median quite a bit. and the average is still being pulled up by some of these even bigger price jumps in some of the other places. So I think that’s a big reason why those two don’t sync up too well. but I think Seattle

This year as we’re looking at 2022 might be a place where we’re gonna see a little bit more growth because people are now looking and people are even asking me about it. It seems like it’s a lot more affordable place to buy all of a sudden and compared to other parts in King County. So I think we’re gonna see a little bit of a resurgence in the city of Seattle. Come 2022, last stat here for 2021 recap, we had a 6.6% average above asking price all across the county for 2021 and that was a 4.8% jump. So last year in, well I guess two years ago now, right? Cause we’re in 2022, we had a 1.7% over asking price average. So countywide we just saw a lot more houses selling over asking price some getting way, way more. And we’ll talk about a few of those here towards the end in King County across the board we just saw a lot more competition for houses.

I wanna touch on condos here briefly as well because I think condos deserve their due as we talk about wrapping up 2021. So if we’re looking at condos, we saw an increase in listings very slightly 0.5% in King County we saw a 22.8% jump in pending sales for condos and a 25% jump enclosed sales. And a lot of the condos in 2020 and 2021 were sitting on the market. It was a little harder to sell condos and they were actually going down in value when some of the houses were going up in value. and there’s lots of different factors that could play into that and I would just say covid is probably a big part of that and some of the preference changes, at least short-term preference changes, but some long-term preference changes. But I think this last year we saw a little bit of a resurgence in people buying condos, again, specifically in Seattle and I think that’s why we’re seeing some of these numbers changing.

But we saw days on market go down a little bit from 27 to 24 days on average we saw an increase in median sales price 7% and we saw a 3.3% jump in the average sales price from last year to this year. So instead of condos going backwards in value last year we saw them going up in value, which is a nice change if you’re a homeowner and that was a 1.8% above asking price average. We saw condos last year selling below asking price on average. And this year we saw them selling above asking price on average. So again, a little bit of a resurgence in the condo market. I think we’ll continue to see that in 2022 because I think people are going to be adjusting what they’re looking for in their expectations because they may want to be closer in again to the city and that would give them the opportunity to focus a little bit more in on condos again. and then also I think Seattle I mentioned earlier is going to see a little bit of a resurgence in 2022 as well. So I expect personally that we’re gonna see Seattle’s median sales price and average sales price jump a little bit more this year than it did last year and I think we’re gonna see that in the condo market as well. And a lot of those condos are in Seattle. So I’m excited to see what 2022  holds for us in King County. I do expect that we’re gonna see prices continue to climb in King County. A lot of that’s driven by some of the data I’m even looking at as we wrap up December. And if I’m looking back at the residential data here and we’re gonna flip the page so to speak right now just to December, wrapping up 2021 and we’re still seeing 5.8% above asking price in December, right? Slower time of year we saw a lot less homes come on the market. So I mentioned earlier we saw the amount of homes on the market drop even below where it was last year to a pretty pretty low amount of houses. it looks like countywide as we wrapped up December 409 houses across the whole county that were available. And some of those are probably already gone. And we wrapped up kind of with this idea that we’re gonna see more and more houses coming on the market in the beginning of January.

And that’s what I’ve been talking with clients about and we’re already seeing that more houses are coming on the market. So if you’re a buyer thinking about purchasing in King County, I think there’s hope that there will be more houses available and I don’t think inventory is gonna stay at 0.2 months all year long. We usually see the most amount of houses coming on the market in the spring and early summer. So I expect that number to climb, how high the amount of inventory will be in the spring and summer is really hard to predict, but I doubt that we’re going to have enough to keep up with buyer demand. So I’d be really shocked to see this number climb two dramatically, which really means we’re gonna stay in this competitive space. So countywide, I think we saw an average sales price jump at the end of December, right?

So we talked about the year over year numbers. I think we’re gonna see a very similar jump in prices again in King County. I think some of the outlying areas, places like Seattle, which are pulling down the average in parts of south King County maybe are pulling down that average. I think those places are gonna continue to go up in value as people look for places that are more affordable. So I think when we look back at this data, maybe the higher price markets like Bellevue and Kirkland might not see 20, 30, 40% jumps in prices, which we’ve seen last year. Crazy, but I think some of the outlying areas may see jumps that aren’t quite that dramatic, but a little bit more robust, which will continue to keep these percentages climbing. Before we wrap up the King County market update for this month, I wanna highlight a few places that finished the year really, really strong. And as I’m looking through median sales prices in King County across the board, I’m noticing a few places that really like stand out as far as their year over year jumps. And again, this isn’t for all of the year, this is just December 2021 over December, 2022. A few places four specifically made huge jumps in their median sales price year over year as we wrapped up the year. So Redmond saw a 58.9% jump year over year in median sales price compared to the end of 2021. That was with 35 houses selling. So not a ton, but still I think a pretty good sample size. Sam Amish had 45 houses sell, still not a ton, but again, decent sample size, 62.8% jump in median sales price year over year and is Aqua saw a jump of 72.6% year over year in median sales price for the month of December. Crazy with 34 listings. So again, decent sample size, not not like we had five or six houses sell, right? Sometimes that skews the number, but out of 34 houses, that’s a huge jump. There was one though, lake Forest Park in specific as I’m looking at the data and on my other page here, bear with me, lake Forest Parks saw 55% jump year over year. and it surprised me a little bit and I looked at the data and it looks like 10 sales, so a little bit smaller of a sample size.

So that’s probably skewing our data. But still, lake Forest Parks seen a lot of growth in 2022, so I don’t want to discount it at all. but I was surprised to see such a big jump. So I think we just had some bigger priced sales at the end of the year. One other stat I wanted to note was the percentage over asking price. So three places saw percentages over asking price, average amount above asking price more than 15% in December. So Bellevue, Redmond and New Castle all had homes selling at least 15% above asking price are more on average in Bellevue and Redmond, Bellevue specifically was almost 17% over asking price. So if you’re thinking about buying in King County and you’re really into the east side of the lake, Bellevue, Redmond, some Amish, Kirkland, all these places, we’re seeing way over 10% above asking price.

But specifically Bellevue and Redmond are the hottest heading into the new year. Thanks so much for watching my first King County real estate market update for 2022 for the month of January. I super appreciate your attention here in these videos and the fact that you made it all the way to the end means you wanna see more of these, hopefully. So please consider subscribing to my channel for more updates on the King County real estate market update. And I’m always trying to make these better. So if you have any thoughts about the video ways it could be better, please comment below if you have thoughts on places that you wanna highlight. I know there’s lots of people from all over the county that are like, make a video for, you know, Renton, make a video for Duval. And I love all those places. but I think it’s hard to make specific videos that many specific videos. So I do my best in each of these updates too. Highlight different parts or different places in the county from time to time. But if you have specific requests you want to see stats or you want to talk or dialogue about certain areas, please feel free to reach out to me via the video. or you can just go ahead and reach out to me directly and I got my cell phone, email, all that contact information down below.