King County Real Estate Market Update | April 2023

What’s up King County? Zach McDonald, your real estate agent here, and this is my King County real Estate market update for April, 2023. We’re gonna look at the stats here for King County over the past month. So we’re gonna look at March 20, 23 stats. We’re going to compare them with last month and the previous year, and we’re gonna look at where and talk about where the market’s headed here in 2023. Now

I’m surprised and well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the housing market is picking up already. And I, I guess I had hope that it would, but at the same time, I am pleasantly surprised to start to see home selling at asking price, selling above, asking price. We’ll do a fun little exercise here towards the end, but in general, across King County Home sold for over asking price, over asking price in King County across the board, but about 50% of the cities did or didn’t sell above asking price. But I’d say that’s encouraging to see that, that the competition buyers are returning to the market. I think a, a large reason that the supply is low, we just don’t have as many listings and we see that as we jump into some of the data here. New listings in King County, they’re up month over month, which is normal.

We’re seeing more houses come on the market in March than we did back in February, but year over year from 2022, we see a 25% decrease in the new listings across King County. Pending sales are also down something we’ve been talking about over the past few months, but also we’re seeing that still 30.6% down year over year pending sales, but up from last month. So again, more buyer activity. Close sales are also up month over month from February, but down 33.7% year over year days on market is starting to decline. 34 days on market was the average in King County. I mentioned in my Seattle update, and you should follow those too, the Seattle Bellevue ones where we talk a little bit more ideas and thoughts about the market and less super tactics here. But the general trend has been that houses are selling quicker, so the average is still higher, but the median days is creeping down.

And depending on where you’re at, it might be 10 days on the market, it might be 15 days on the market, but it’s certainly not 34. that would be factoring in some of those ones that have been on for quite a while. median sales price is down 9.3% from last year, and the average is down 9.6%. but we’ve seen over the past couple months, king County prices have been increasing. So 80 148,375 was the median sales price in King County. The average was 1,107,000 8 98. Again, both of those are up month over month, but down about nine to nine and a half percent year over year percent of list price. Last year, houses were selling 13.4% above asking price this year 0.4% above asking price. That’s a obviously big swing, but houses are selling above asking price. We talked about that to, that to me says that we’re entering into a more competitive market.

And you can bet that if houses are selling over asking price, they’re also selling with fewer contingencies in the contract and better terms for the seller. And that’s what we’re seeing from experience as well. Not just speculation. Inventory of homes for sale has picked up considerably from last year at the same time, but also month over month. We did see a slight uptick in the supply number 1.1 month of supply in King County. Still really low and we’ll see. I am, I guess I’m really curious to see how the next few months shake out in the spring, because historically we do see a lot of new listings in the spring and in the summer. If this year is anything like 2019, it’s not going to be as much as we’ve seen in the past. And so far we’ve seen the obviously 25, 20, 30% fewer new listings.

So if that trend continues through the spring, we’re going to see considerably less new listings for the whole year. But we’re also seeing a similar amount of decrease in buyers. So if the buyer activity picks up and the listings don’t, we may see that supply number stay or even go down. Normally we do see it rise, so we’ll see how the, the buyer activity plays out. And I think some of that might be rate related as well. If interest rates continue to stay in the low sixes or trend even lower, we may see an even larger uptick in the buyers and maybe an uptick in the supply too. Let’s look at real quick. sometimes I highlight specific areas or sections of King County in these updates. The way I wanna do this today is gonna be a little different. I wanna highlight the areas first that are seeing asking price or above so far in March.

And then I wanna highlight the areas where homes are still selling below, asking price on average. So let’s start with the cities in King County where we’re seeing House is selling above, asking price. In Seattle, home sold 1.1% above asking price. Shoreline 0.9% above asking price. Kirkland was 0.4% above asking price. Woodenville was 0.1% over asking Price Kenmore 2.1% above asking price. Fall City 4.9% above asking Price. Buren 3.9% above asking Price. Maple Valley, 2.1% above asking Price. Algona our favorite highlight here, 0.7% over asking Price Covington, 1.0% above asking Price. Des Moines, 3.5% above asking price. Federal way, 2.2% above asking Price Renton 0.5% above asking price. Mercer Island 0.4% above asking price. Normandy Park right at asking price in Tuck, Willa, 0.1% above asking price. That was a pretty large list of cities where we’re seeing houses selling above asking price. But let’s look at some of the places where houses are still selling below asking price of King County because, well, this list is almost as long.

Bellevue selling, 99.3% of asking Price. Redmond, 98.8% of asking Price. Some Amish, 97.7% of asking Price is Aqua. 97.9% of asking Price. You’ll see this trend, a lot of it’s on the east side, Bellevue and suburbs of Bellevue. Carnation, 98.8% of Asking Price Duval, 98.7% of Asking Price. Snow Kwame, 99% of asking Price. Kent, 99.7% of Asking Price Auburn, 99.6% of Asking Price. Black Diamond, 98.9% of Asking Price. I love that name. That’s an awesome name. It’s also a good climbing brand. Clyde Hill, 87.4% of Asking Price. And let’s just add this, the median sales price in Clyde Hill was 4,675,000. So little different price point here, Enumclaw, 99.4% of Asking Price Lake Forest Park, 99.7% of Asking Price Medina, kind of similar to what I said about Clyde Hill. 96.7% of asking Price. Milton Washington, 99.3% of asking Price. New Castle, 98.4% of asking Price.

North Bend, 99.3% of asking Price Pacific, 97.6% of asking Price SeaTech, 99.4% of asking Price And Sky Comish 95.7% of asking price. So the tally is 16 over asking price. 20 under asking price Cities in King County, and again across the board over asking price on average. And if you’re a buyer in this market and you’re, you’re looking at a city in King County and King County is very large, you’ve got, you know, the east side, you’ve got the south end, you’ve got the north end, you’ve got Seattle Bellevue, there is more competition, things are changing, the market’s shifting, the market shifted in the summer, in the fall and into the winter, and you were seeing things shifting in the buyer’s favor. And right now things are shifting back towards the St seller’s favor. Are we in an ultra competitive environment right now? No. No.

But some of the competitive strategies are being employed again in offers, asking price and escalation clauses, paying a little over asking price, a little bit of that silent bid situation, returning people, removing contingencies in the contract. Yes, it’s happening. People adding in things to make the seller happy, like a shorter closing date or increasing their earnest money amount, their good faith deposit, or even making it non-refundable. These are things that are starting to happen again. So as we finish out the spring and head into the summer, a lot of the housing market here is going to ride on the inventory. The amount of listings that we see, I think interest rates are going to continue to be a factor in the housing market, but a lot of it is buyer sentiment, right? Are are people in a place of fear or are they in a place of confidence?

And there has been over the past few months, an increase in confidence in some situations, but there’s also still this lingering unknown about what’s going to happen with the economy. Are we hitting an A recession? I think the truth is that we’ve been in one for a little while, but we’re delaying calling it that. But at the same time, I think there’s still this lingering fear. So we’ve got fear, we’ve got interest rates, there’s multiple factors at play here, but if the beginning of the year is any indication, I think that things are picking up and that we’re seeing the housing market start to come back to life. Do I think that 2023 is going to be a super hot year? By no means, I think we’re gonna see relatively uneventful year as we finish out the year, but at the same time, I think we’re gonna see prices recover a little bit from where they were at their lows as we finish out the year.

I also think there’s still gonna be quite a few buying opportunities this summer and potentially this fall, especially if interest rates go up a little bit more or if we see a dramatic increase in inventory. Thanks so much for watching this King County Real Estate Market update for April, 2023. I hope you got some value out of this content. And if you want to continue to see videos like this, maybe this is your first time stumbling onto the channel, please consider subscribing. Of course. If you want to talk more about your situation, I’m happy to be a resource for you. And I’m going to link up a few things down below and I wanna explain them. I’ve never linked these things up before, but we have a home buyer class and I’ve been teaching these with good lender friend of mine for a while.

I’m going to link up the website in the description. So if you’re interested in maybe attending a class, learning how to buy a house, we move these around locationally. Sometimes they’re in King County, sometimes they’re in Snohomish County. And the whole goal with these classes is to help people learn how the home buying process works, learn how the mortgage process works, and also learn about the housing market and be an informed buyer. The second thing I’m gonna link up down below, which is new, is a link to what’s called a home bot report. Home bot is a service that does similar to like a Zillow estimate or something like that. You get an automated report and you get to see, you know, how your equity position in your house is. This is more for somebody that owns a house, but if you’re a homeowner in King County and you want to receive this report from me on a monthly basis, that’s something you can subscribe to as well.