King County Real Estate Market Update | August 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 August, 2022. We’re jumping right into the stats here as we look back at July, 2022. These are the MLS stats hot off the press for King County. As we’re looking at the numbers here, I’m seeing some changes and these are some changes that I expected to see. We’re seeing that we’re down on the number of new listings, which is normal for this time of year down, 2.6% year over year, but also down month over month. Pending sales are down this last month from the previous month, but fairly similar. So not a big drop off there in pending sales. but we are seeing a 25.8% drop in pending sales from last year. So we had quite a bit more houses going off the market.

closed sales, this is a big drop here, 43% drop in close sales in King County from July, 2021 to July, 2022. but days on market staying relatively similar. Average days on market 13 versus 10, but you know, statistically 30% jump. So some places are seeing a little bit longer if we look city by city. but countywide 13 days on market, which is still relatively fast, but I think a big part of that’s pricing in how you price because we are seeing prices going down. So median sales price is down month over month, but again, year over year up 3.4% at $900,000. In King County average sales price was again down month over month, but up 5.5% year over year at $1,163,520. Percentage of list price received 6.2% down. So just over asking price on average 0.3%, which is small last year, almost 7% over asking price.

But if we look at a different stat, which is percentage of the original asking price, it’s actually 98.9% or down 7.3% year over year. So last year we were seeing the houses selling above the original asking prices, and we’re still seeing a few houses sell for over asking price. There’s always certain houses in any market that are going to be competitive because they’re special or in great neighborhoods, but on average, king County houses are actually selling below their original asking price. So again, I I want to make sure that’s super clear because we’ve talked about price drops and I’m seeing more price drops or about the same amount of price drops as I’m seeing new listings week by week here over the past three, four weeks. And that’s because prices are coming down and people are dropping their prices to find the market and find what buyers are willing to pay.

And so I think it’s important to be looking at this number, right? Percentage of the original asking price versus what the dropped, reduced asking price is inventory of homes. We’ve seen a lot more homes available, 93.5% more so almost a hundred percent more houses in King County this last month versus the prior year, almost 4,000 houses available in King County. We had less than 2000 last year. Month’s supply 125% up. So that, again, mentioning that inventory with the inventory numbers factored in, right? And the decrease in pending sales, the month’s supply number also jumped quite a bit over a hundred percent more. We went from 0.8 to 1.8% of the supply numbers. So there’s a lot more options per buyers, and I think as you’re considering just what’s going on in the King County market, the, the big idea here is that buyers and sellers are adjusting and having to figure out what the new normal is.

Think sellers are finally starting to have realistic expectations, right? Accepting, I think acceptance is the word, accepting what’s happening in the market. And that is that prices are going down and buyers are going from having a fear of missing out and paying way over asking price to having a fear of potentially participating, which is a big difference. And they’ve gone from, oh my gosh, I need a house to, well, what happens if I buy one? Am I gonna be in trouble in the future? So that shift in sentiment has definitely changed things in slammed on the breaks, so to speak, for buyers in the housing market. Now, those buyers, they’ll come back someday. They’re still renting a house or sitting on the sidelines. Maybe they’re just continuing on in their lease for the year, but they’re still there, but currently they’re not in the market, right?

So at some point when the market stabilizes in, their confidence comes back, which I’m starting to see here over the past few weeks, right? Interest rates have stabilized. The Fear index and the stock market’s going down, the stock market’s stabilizing a little bit. I think people’s confidence is starting to increase, and that might be having to do with the Fed increasing the rates a couple different times, pretty significantly that confidence might be, hey, inflation might not. Inflation might be coming to a halt or at least slowing down, right? Because inflation’s been out of control and that’s caused a lot of fear. among other things, as we’re looking at specific cities here in King County, instead of targeting an area or highlighting an area, which I do most of the time, I wanna highlight a few of the outliers. And these are cities where we’re seeing greater than the average appreciation. So the median sales price in King County’s up 3.4% year over year, but there are places in King County where we’re seeing more than 15 or even more than 20% jumps in the median sales price. So Black Diamond was 16.5% up and Covington,

19.1% up. So big jumps Kenmore, 30.3% jump. Woo-hoo. That’s big. That’s Big. New Castle also made the list here as we’re looking 35.5% jump and North Bend, 26.2% jump. Those are, those are substantial. Given that the median was 3.4%, that’s a pretty big jump. Now, Clyde Hill and also Medina, as we’re looking at those numbers had big massive jumps too, but those places have, well, let’s just say there’s some pretty big differences in the house prices in there, and sometimes you only have a house or two sell in a month. So I don’t want to include them in that amazing outliers list, but they also had pretty big jumps there and <laugh> specifically Medina with a 159% jump in medium sales price. Yeah, but again, probably just a couple sales in there. didn’t verify that, but I think that’s a big part of it.

But some of these other cities, again, have just a lot more houses selling. But across King County, I think the housing market is starting to stabilize a little bit. We’re seeing the amount of new listings picking up, but we’re also seeing more pending sales than new listings. So what I’m predicting is that we’ll see the supply numbers start to level off a little bit. I think we might even see them start declining into September within the expectation that they pick up a little bit. But I think that initial push of, I gotta get my house on the market calming down a little bit, I think buyers are starting to get a little bit more confident, and I think that’s going to be good for the housing market moving forward. Thanks so much for watching My King County real Estate market update for August, 2022. If you want to connect about buying or selling a house in King County, please feel free to reach out. And if you wanna see more updates like this, please subscribe to my channel.