King County Real Estate Market Update | February 2021

Hey Y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my King County real Estate market update for February, 2021. Now, as we jump into this market update, we’re looking at stats from January, 2021, and we’re gonna focus specifically on King County. If you’ve been following my YouTube channel or following my videos for a while, you know that I talk about the real estate market in Seattle and surrounding areas every single month, and we added these a few months back to highlight specifically the couple different counties that I serve. And after asking people for feedback, people are still wanting to see these. So I’m going to continue with these county updates, at least for the time being. Without further ado, let’s jump into the stats. So last month in King County, we saw an 8% jump in new listings year over year and pretty substantial jump from what was on the market in December to January.

Super normal to see an uptick in new listings in the new year because we just got out of the holidays. So more houses are on the market, but there are a ton of buyers that have been either sitting on the sidelines or waiting for a house. So this housing market is super, super competitive in King County. Evidence of that, we saw a jump, 15.2% jump in pending sales, which are houses under contract. And the number is almost the same, not quite, just a few more new listings than pending sales, but pretty much every single house that came on the market went pending in the month. There was also a huge jump in closed sales in King County. Year over year we saw a 9.8% increase. And for days on market we saw a really, really substantial drop. So last year in all of King County homes were on the market for an average of 46 days.

And in King County in 2021, January, 2021, we saw that number drop down to 26 days on market. So countywide, that’s including Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, all the way down to places like Maple Valley. We saw a substantial drop in days on market. The median sales price in King County drop just slightly last month down to 7 29, which was actually still a 13% jump year over year. So home prices have been rising, and we’re talking about residential stats right now. Single family home prices have been jumping up at really, really quick rates. And the average price, this is even crazier. Average prices up 21.5% year over year. And the average price in all of King County $911,813 and and I mentioned some of the cities, but a lot of the most expensive places to live in all of Washington are right in good old King County. In King County

Have been rising quickly and a lot of that’s due to competition. And the average percent of list price received in King County last month was 2.4% above asking price. So most houses on average were selling above the asking price. Now again, that does mean some are selling for a little blow, some are selling for a little above, but the average was 2.4% above asking last year. Same time houses were selling below asking price on average. So we’ve seen a substantial increase in the amount of competition and the market’s definitely a lot hotter. Now the last sta I wanna highlight here is the months of inventory or supply amount of houses in the market. And in King County we have about half a month, so two weeks of homes that are available for purchase. What that means is that if no new houses come on the market in the next two weeks, there aren’t gonna be any more houses to sell.

Last year we saw 0.8, and this year we have 0.5 months of supply, which is actually 37.5% less. When you think about it, it seems like wow, there wasn’t very many houses on the market last year and there aren’t very many this year true, but it’s a lot, a lot tighter than it was, and it’s looking a lot more like 2016, 2017 inventory levels, which is contributing to the super, super hot housing market and the steep increase in prices. Now I want to breeze through a few of the condo stats as well and focus in on a few key numbers here. So for the condo market, we actually saw a decline in the median sales price year over year. So we talked about a 13% jump in the residential sales price, but on the condo side we saw a 0.5 negative 0.5% increase. So we saw a fi a 0.5% decrease in sales price for condos, and we did see a slightly higher average.

So one point 9% increase in the average price, but the median number was actually backwards in King County. And I’ll say I think a lot of this is due to the downtown Seattle condos having pretty steep discounts, and that’s gonna skew the numbers here. But as we look at ’em in King County, it looks like unless maybe you were in Seattle, you probably were doing just fine on your condo and seeing some growth. But the residential single family homes we’re appreciating at a much, much higher rate. Well, that wraps up my King County market update for February, 2021. My hope with these updates is to supplement my Seattle real estate market update, where I talk a little bit more about my thoughts on what’s going on and what to expect next. So if you found this update valuable, go ahead and check out my Seattle Real Estate market update for more information.