King County Real Estate Market Update | February 2023

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, 2023.

December was extremely, extremely slow and we’re starting to see things picking up here in January and it’s normal. It’s normal. When we look at this, we’re gonna be looking at the stats for January as we’re now in February, but what you’ll notice is a lot of the stats as far as price, sales prices and closed sales, all that’s going to be listings from December, that closed in January, right? And then the new listings pending sales, that’s all the relevant activity for what’s happening right now and what will affect things next month in the stats. So new listings are up slightly month over month, but down 4.3% year over year, pending sales up just slightly from the previous month, but up also year over year. 4.4% close sales down 32.5% year over year. And again, I love the year over year comparisons. I think it gives some good perspective.

And if we look at days on market, this is another one that’s just huge. 45 days on market versus 17 days on market last year in 2022. Median sales price, this is the one that I think sticks in most people’s minds in King County. 790,000 is the median sales price for January, 2023 down 30,000 from last month, but up 0.6% year over year. I would like to make a note as we’re talking about the prices here. Again, the sales from December are what’s being recorded or sold in January. So if we want to think about it, typically if we’re looking at a graph, we’ll see kind of the housing prices start to fall into the fall in in winter. But the last dip before it starts to pick up usually is January, because again, it’s those sales from December. So it’s not abnormal to see a little dip at the end of the year and have things start to pick up, which I think is already starting to happen.

Average sales price was just over a million, $1,006,727 down slightly from last month and down 1.4% year over year. Again, these are not massive numbers, right? Not big drops year over year, but it’s going to be a little bit bigger I think as we head to the spring. But we’ll see percent of list price received 8.2% down year over year, just about 98%, 97.7%. But last year in January in King County, 106.4%. So 6.4 above asking price was average inventory. We all know that the amount of houses available has picked up substantially, but the supply here going from 0.3 months to one month of supply, again, that’s a big jump if we think about year over year numbers. But one month of supply is really low and it’s down again from the previous month in December. 1.1 was the supply number. Now we’re at one.

So if we’re looking at King County data here, I’m not seeing anything that I didn’t expect. I’m seeing that prices dipped a tiny bit here in January from uh, the previous month that we’re kind of hovering around the same point we were last year. Starting to see some of those maybe negative numbers like we’ve been talking about here on the channel. I’m seeing that we’re in seeing inventory continue to decline, which is again, normal for the time of year and a good sign actually if this number wasn’t G declining or it was going up, that’s where I would be more concerned. As we look at some of the cities here in King County, I want to highlight some of the ones that have maybe decreased uh, the most and also point out a few that are doing pretty well. So if we look at some of these places here on the east side, and I think the east side has really suffered the most as far as home values.

Bellevue’s down 12.5% year over year. Shoreline is down 20% year over year. Kirkland’s down 14.3%. Redmond is down 26.8%. Samish 17.1 Woodenville 22.4% down year over year. Kenmore 35.1% is aqua down, 18.4%, Duvals down 14.4%. Maple Valley’s down 9.4% heading down to the south end, Covington’s down 8.7%. Des Moines 11.5% down Enum Claw, 19.7% down Federal way, not too bad, down 6.7%. Lake Forest Park down 11%. Mercer Islands down 39.9%. That’s gotta be a small sample size cuz Mercer Island. You guys have been doing great here recently. It’s interesting though, if we look at places like Seattle, 3.5% up year over year, that’s a positive Fall cities. Fall City, you had a couple big sales here, one point <laugh>, 142% up the uh, median sales price was 1,838,000. So good for you Fall city, but uh, that’s definitely an outlier. Buren was up 1.5% year over year.

Good job Buren. Let’s see, I think we got one more on here. New Castle was up 17.3%. Normandy Park up 32.8%. North bend up 18.6%. And Tukwila again, you also had a couple exciting sales. Your average sales price was over was almost 1.2 million. 1,000,800, sorry 1 million, 185,000. Um, good for you. Tukwila, probably not going to continue <laugh> for the foreseeable future, but you know, a couple big sales in the month and overall King County, 790,000 median sales price. Many are pulling that average up on the east side still. But if I’m looking at where, you know, the biggest price drops have been, it’s been on the east side, if I’m thinking about buying on the east side, it’s probably when I would want to be doing it. Um, prices are still down as we’re seeing. They’re going to start to pick up here in the spring with some of the competition returning and I would take advantage of it.

Homeowners real quick, if you missed the boat, uh, last year in selling and maybe decided to hold off, I certainly don’t think you’re gonna sell for as much as your neighbors did last year, but the good news is that some of that competition is returning to the market and buyers are coming back even though interest rates are a little bit higher. So if it’s something you’ve been thinking about making a move, downsizing or maybe even buying that next house, you might be surprised at the amount of competition and interest that you’ll get on your house. Thanks so much for watching this King County Real Estate Market update. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, please consider doing so. And if you wanna talk more in depth about the market in any part of King County, please feel free to reach out.