King County Real Estate Market Update | April 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 April, 2022. As we jump into this update, it might feel a tiny bit different. The MLS stats aren’t technically ready for me in the traditional format, but I went ahead and pulled all the data here for you so I can get this update out to you sooner rather than later. With that being said, we’re going to talk about the market and the stats. We’re going to highlight the Redmond Woodenville area and just focus on that a little bit here in this update. And then we’re going to talk about some application where I see the market heading in King County here over the next few months coming up, king County set a new median sales price record of $935,000. That’s a 13.5% jump year over year.

If we look at the average sales price, we see a little bit larger jump, 17.8% jump year over year. And the average sales price in King County was one million two hundred twenty four thousand nine hundred seventy eight thousand dollars. And as we’re considering this data, remember that we’re talking about the single family homes. I’m not including condos here in these stats. And today we’re not going to talk much about condos. We’re gonna focus in on single families for the King County update, the King County average percent above list price. So this is how much your house is selling above the asking price. In King County, the number is 13.4% above asking price across the county, which is a 5.2% jump. If we look back to last March’s data, and there are a few places here, even higher than 20%, and we’re gonna talk about those here later in the video. The new listings in King County, up 3.6% year over year.

Typically this is the time of the year. We start to see more and more houses coming on the market. We saw just over 3000 houses come on the market last month, which is the highest we’ve had for this year. And as I mentioned just a little bit more than last year, pending sales in King County down 7.4%, 2,672 pending sales. So a little fewer pending sales than new homes on the market. But I will say a lot of the houses that came on the market towards the end of March won’t likely be recorded until April. So I wouldn’t say that this is a period of time where, oh my gosh, like we’re gonna see a huge amount of inventory start to pick up and I’ll talk about that here later in the video. I think it’s also important to consider the days on market. The average in King County last month was nine days on market, down 40% year over year. And the median days on market was the same five days on market. So it just means there were more houses closer to the median this year than last year. And that supply number, inventory amount of homes on the market is continuing to shrink in King County. If we look at year over year down 20% 0.4 months, last year we had 0.5 months. So not a huge difference, but if we look back to 2020, we had 1.2 months of supply in March and that’s still a hot housing market. Still a seller’s market where the sellers have advantage in the negotiations, but we find ourselves in a spot where we’re still really, really depressed in the amount of homes on the market. I will say last month, I think it was 0.3 months if I remember correctly.

So we’ve seen a little uptick in the supply, but not anything that causes me to think, wow, we’re gonna have a lot more houses on the market. So as we look towards the rest of the spring and look towards the summer, I think we’re gonna continue to see that trend of more houses coming on the market. One thing that may affect our inventory levels as we head towards the spring and summer is the interest rates. I think the interest rates are something that we want to continue to watch. I have made another video that I’ll link up below where I talk about what might happen as interest rates continue to climb. I think that the two biggest drivers here in the King County real estate market are, number one, the lack of inventory. And when I say that, I mean severe lack of inventory and also the low interest rates.

And we have seen that interest rates have been ticking up as the year has gone on. And the most recent data, if we look@bankrate.com, I’m not gonna quote all the different sources, but the most, um, recent one as of April 5th, 2020, their average daily rate was 4.88% surveyed across, uh, major lenders across the country. So we’re seeing those rates tick up. Last year we were significantly down, we were down in the threes. Um, so we’ve seen interest rates climb, but we’re still seeing that continued demand and we’re still seeing people paying way over asking price. So there’s still a lot of competition in the market. So my prediction is that I don’t think we’ll see any dramatic changes in the amount of homes on the market unless, unless we see a lot more houses coming on the market because there are still enough buyers that have the finances and the means to pay these higher interest rates.

I think back in 2018 when we started to see interest rates take up last time, the market couldn’t handle it. And in this case, I think the market can handle it better than it could back then. We will see, right? Time will tell, but I think that as we see interest rates tick up this time, we’re not seeing that decrease in interest as quickly as we did last time. So stay tuned, continue to follow along with these updates and you’ll be able to hear my most recent thoughts on a monthly basis. So we’ll pause here real quick. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet and you wanna stay up to date on the King County market, please subscribe right now and we’ll continue on. Now we’re gonna focus in on the Redmond Woodenville area. So today we’re gonna look at Redmond specifically $1.65 million median sales price, which is a 31.5% jump year over year.

Redmonds average percent above asking price 23.9% over asking price half a month of supply 0.5 months, six days on market average. So kind of right in line there with the county numbers, but as we can see, they’re an outlier on price. And also the average percent over asking price woodenville very similarly. Um, 19.8% over asking price. Two of the highest in the county, 1.92 million median sales price 0.5 days of inventory, four days on market. So again, very similar markets there. Carnation and Duval, very similar geographically, but a lot more cost effective. So if you like that area but you wanna move a little farther out, these might be legitimate places to consider. Carnation $836,000 median sales price and 14% over asking price on average Duval $975,000. Median sales price, 16.8% over asking price. So again, still competitive, but the price points are a lot more reasonable if you like the location, but you don’t wanna spend that additional money, I would consider those two places a legitimate substitute for the Redmond Woodenville location.

If you want to add a little bit of a drive, you can save quite a bit of money. A couple thoughts as we wrap up this King County housing market update. And the first thought is that we are still seeing a lot more pending sales than we are new listings. And something that I think people have been fearful of is that as interest rates continue to creep up, that we would see less demand and we wouldn’t be able to essentially see the same amount of buyers in the market. And it’s hard to quantify how many less buyers there, um, maybe some pre-approval numbers as they come out. But as I’m looking at the last week in King County, the most recent data, this isn’t the data that’s published yet, but this is what’s my little snapshot inside the mls. We had 471 new listings in King County over the last week and 677 pending sales. So it’s not like we’re seeing a lot of added up pent up inventory. We’re actually still seeing houses selling faster than they’re coming on, even though interest rates are up and we’re seeing a lot more houses coming on the market. So I think as we continue to follow along this spring, that will be something we’ll consider is inventory climbing And it’s normal for inventory to climb this time of year, but is it climbing and outpacing substantially the amount of buyers? And at this point, it’s going to take a lot I think for that to happen.

But right now we’re still seeing that there are considerably more buyers than there are new listings. And so as a buyer, you’re definitely gonna be paying more with higher interest rates. Um, you may face a little less competition. That would be something to expect. And I think as we get closer towards the summer, we’ll see a little bit more transparency on the pricing. There won’t be as much of the price escalation. A lot of that typically happens in the springtime. Um, and then it levels off a little bit later in the year. That’s just a seasonal cycle in our market. So if you are somebody who wants to buy but doesn’t want to compete as much, you may end up paying a little bit more this summer and fall, but it’ll be a little bit easier to, uh, predict where prices will end up. So if you’re somebody who’s thinking about buying here in King County and you want to connect, please feel free to reach out. If you’re somebody thinking about selling in King County and you want to know what your house is worth, or you want to know what it might look like to get that sold this spring, I’m happy to be a resource for you as well.