King County Real Estate Market Update | April 2021
In this King County Real Estate Market Update, I share King County stats from March 2021 along with my own perspective on the market.
You can check out last month’s King County housing market update here – King County Real Estate Market March 2021
Transcript:
Hey Y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my King County Real Estate market update for April, 2021. As we jump into this video, I want to preface it by saying we’re looking at stats from March, 2021. The Northwest Multiple Listing Service just released these stats today, so they’re hot off the press. And what we’re gonna do in this video, we are going to look at the stats, pretty much bullet point status. I’ll add a little bit of commentary here, not as much for these videos. If you want to see more commentary on the market, you’ll want to check out my Seattle real Estate market updates that I do every single month. Hint, it’s not just Seattle that I’m talking about, but YouTube and Google both like it when I talk about it. So I do. But if you want more commentary, that’s where you’re gonna find it and I’ll link that one up here below in the description.
Now as we look at the stats here for King County for the month we had a 9.6% increase in new listings. I think part of that was because of the Covid shutdown. Last year we didn’t see a particularly large number of new listings, but we had fewer last year at the same time. And so this year, well we saw a few more pending sales were up 52.9% <laugh>. Okay, that’s a huge number and I’ve been using big numbers like that recently. This one’s a little bit larger because we had fewer houses go under contract last year. Again, because of Covid, the closed sales were up 18.9%, a little bit more of a normal number. Here we saw days on market drop dramatically. So last year in the middle of, or the beginning of the pandemic, we saw 25 days on market, 2020 in March. And last week when we got these stats, 15 days on market, median sales price in King County was $823,998.
And we saw an increase in of 13.7% year over year, the average sales price broke the million dollar mark here, 1,040,000 and $122. That was up 19.5%. So we’re seeing a substantial number of houses selling above the million dollar mark, and that’s where we’re seeing that average pulled up. The median numbers lower, but a lot of these locations have pretty high prices. We talked about Bellevue in my Seattle market, update 1.5 plus to live in Bellevue. So that’s kind of pulling up those averages. Percentage of list price received 7.7% above asking price on average, which is 5% increase from last year. So we were still seeing houses in King County selling above the asking price last year. Inventory of homes for sale, this is a big stat here. So last year we saw 2,500 houses on the market just over that. This year we saw 983 houses on the market at the end of March in the county, that’s a 61.3% decline.
That’s very substantial and that’s a big reason that we’re seeing the kind of market we are. And if we look back at inventory or months of supply, last year was not a lot of inventory. We still were looking at about 1.2 months of supply. There were fewer buyers in the market and a lot more houses available, but still pretty much keeping up with the monthly demand. Right now we’re at less than half of a month of supply. So pretty much most of the houses coming on the market in King County are selling really quickly. I mentioned earlier, I think the covid slowdown last year affected the stats here for March a little bit. I think we’ll see that more in April and May as we look back, maybe even June. Typically the hottest months of the year, think we’re gonna find that this year they’re gonna be super hot.
And last year they were actually a little bit slow and that hasn’t quite caught up in the stats yet. So pay attention over these next few months. As we look at the stats, I think there’ll be even more inflation in some of these percentage changes. Just a heads up, and I do want to spend just a minute here on condos because I do want to talk about it. I think some people are interested in these stats. So I’ll share a few high points here. For condos, we saw a 20% increase in new listings pending sales, 81.1% up closed sales, 9.1% more closed sales days on market was actually up. Okay, so we’re talking about how quickly the single family houses are selling. The condos actually were on the market one more day on average than the single family houses. The median sales price was up 8.1%, but we just talked about the residential side, 13.7% up year over year, and the average sales price was up 13.5% for condos.
And again, for the residential single family, 19.5% up. So not as much change here, but still a lot of growth. So if you own a condo, pat yourself on the back, that’s good. you didn’t get as much of the appreciation as the single family houses did though. percentage of list price, this is one dramatic difference here. The residential single family side, we were seeing 7.7% above asking price for the homes and for condos we saw 1.8% above asking price. So a lot less competition on the condo side in King County than for the single family homes. I’ve mentioned this over the past few months and I think it’s important to add here without spending as much time on it. If you want to see more time spent on this, look at March, 2021, king County update. But a lot of the condo stats here are pulled down by Seattle.
Specifically, the Seattle condo market is a lot slower right now than it was a year ago and even a year and a half ago. And so some of these numbers here are pulling down, are pulled down by the Seattle condo market because a large percentage of the condos in King County are in Seattle. And so they skew the data. If you’re outside of Seattle, these numbers are a little bit more favorable. You’re probably paying over asking price a little bit more for a condo. But if you’re buying a condo in Seattle, maybe you’re paying the asking price or a little bit below. I’ve got a little something special for this video. Okay, so in the past, I typically highlight the county as a whole and that’s the case. We did that in this video, but I also want to highlight a few other cities in King County.
So you can see how this average and these prices play out. I mentioned in King County the median sales price was $823,998 very specifically. And that houses were selling on average 7.7% above asking price for the residential single family homes. And as we look at some of these other markets, you’ll get a good idea for where these numbers are being pulled up and maybe where there’s opportunities to get in with a little less competition. Home prices in Seattle are below the median for the county. That might be surprising to you, it might not. And they’re actually selling for less above asking than the county average 5.7%. If we look at Bellevue, I mentioned Bellevue earlier in this video, 1.54 million median sales price, way above the King County median. And houses are selling on average 11.5% above asking, if we look at some Amish, another one, I’m just picking a few random ones here.
Sam Amish, 1.485 million is the median sales price up 33.8% year over year. That’s ridiculous. And then if we look at the amount over asking price, 12.6% above asking, I’ve got a couple more random ones for you here. Rent in 7 38, median sales price. So below the county average, and we are seeing 10.5% above asking price there. Maple Valley we saw 7 16, 5 32. So again, below the King County average. And homes we’re selling on average 9.9% above asking. So you’re seeing that number here consistently. Aside from Seattle, pretty close to 10% above asking price. Maple Valley is pretty far on the south side of King County. If we jump up to the north part of King County, the northern most part, we’re looking at Shoreline. Okay? Shoreline seven 50, median sales price below the average, and 6.8% above asking. So the northern and Southern most parts are gonna have the better prices, but if you’re closer into some of the workplaces, if you’re closer into Bellevue or Seattle, you’re gonna be paying a lot more. Thank you so much for watching my April, 2021
King County Real Estate market update. I hope that this video was valuable for you and if you did make it to the end here, I know that there was some value, so please give it a thumbs up. And if you would like to see more content like this in the future, please consider subscribing.