King County Real Estate Market Update | March 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 March, 2022. In this video, we are going to go over the King County stats from last month, February, 2022. We are going to highlight a few areas of King County. And in this video we’re gonna talk specifically about some of the places in King County that broke $2 million median sales prices for the first time. And then we’re going to talk about a little bit of application for buyers and sellers. Let’s start off with the stats for King County last month. And as we go through these stats, I’ll give a little commentary, but I refrain from adding too much to these updates. So if you wanna see more of my thoughts about the market and where it’s headed in King County, you can check out my Seattle Real Estate market update as well.

And in those videos, I give a little bit more context as I go through these. I try to go through the stats a little quicker here in the King County updates. So as we look at new listings, last month we saw an increase 6.5% year over year in new listings. And we did see an increase month over month as well. Um, historically a little bit more than normal that we see. But about average, we also saw a slight drop in pending sales year over year, uh, about 0.6%. So not a big drop in pending sales, but as I mentioned, a little bit more. New listings, a little fewer pending sales. And honestly, I think that’s just reflected in the fact that these new listings came on near the end of the month. We’ve seen a gradual uptick as the month went on. So a lot of these will be gone by the end of this week, or before you even watched this video, most likely days on market.

We saw 11 days on market average in King County all across the board, which is a massive dropoff from last year, 47.6% dropoff. We did also see a substantial drop, 24.8% in close sales year over year. A lot of that, I believe, is reflected in the fact that we had a lot fewer listings in January. So those listings that went pending and closing in February were less, but we’re going to see an uptick in March for those closed sales. Median sales price in King County is just below the record. Median sales price, $865,000, and that’s a 14% jump year over year. That’s huge. Okay, we’re keeping that pace that we saw last year. Average sales price is a new record in King County. So I’ve mentioned in these videos, king County has a very, very large diverse population. You have areas where it’s a lot less expensive and the areas where it’s a lot more expensive, which is why that median sales price is considerably lower. But the average sales price, new record, $1,110,720. Again, largest median sales price ever in King County.

18.8% jump year over year. Pretty dramatic houses on averaging. King County also got the largest amount above the asking price or percentage of the list price ever in King County. 11.6% jump over the asking price, which is 5.6% up year over year. So it’s essentially double the competition if you wanna look at it that way from last year. And it’s also a huge jump. 5.2% jump over last month. So if you bought a house in King County last month versus, well, if you bought a house in <laugh>, if you bought a co, well, if you bought a house in King County in January versus February, you’re seeing almost double that competition in the percentage over asking price than you did the month before. Why is this persisting? You might ask, and I would say it’s really a supply and demand game here in King County specifically.

Interest rates are a factor. The supply of housing is still fairly depressed. We had 1,140 houses for sale at the same time last year in King County this year, 659 houses, which is 42.2% fewer houses for sale. So you’ve got all these buyers, but you don’t have enough houses for all these buyers, which is why we’re still seeing the supply hovering in that 0.3% range, which is really just one week of houses. So houses come on the market and houses sell, so there’s never any chance for the supply to build up and buyers to have a little bit more choice. They’re all forced to buy this week’s houses and make a decision on these few houses and everybody’s competing for these same houses. There’s a couple other places in King County that are getting near the $2 million Mark Kirkland is pretty close, 1.88 million Redmond, 1.825 million. Both of these places have seen massive jumps in the median sales price, not quite at the $2 million mark yet.

If we look at the percentage of asking price, so this is how much your house is selling over the asking price. I’ve mentioned in these videos for months that there are certain pockets of King County that are way more competitive than others. And I think it’s just worth noting that last month we saw some pretty large numbers in this category. So nine places in King County, nine cities in King County received 20% or more on average for every single house nine. And if we were to look and specifically highlight a few of these Kirkland, 24.1% over asking price on average Redmond, 24.7% over asking price on average New Castle was 24.9% over asking price. And the winner for the largest amount over asking price was Lake Forest Park of all places 25% over asking price. I wanna wrap up this update with a few thoughts for buyers and sellers and

Specifically for buyers. I’ve been sharing this over the past few months. I don’t think this is getting better in the short term. So if you’re somebody who is thinking about buying a house and it’s the right time to buy a house or you need to buy a house, I think you need to, number one, get started earlier with the process. And I also think that you need to have a little bit more of a longer time horizon because inevitably there’s going to be bumps. I don’t see that in the short term future, but there are, there’s always chops in the housing prices. And so if you’re somebody who’s buying and you’re buying at what is right now the peak of the market, there is a large chance that you may see a little dip here in the near future, maybe a year out, maybe two years out.

But if you have a five, six year plan, it’s not going to make much of a difference, at least from a historical perspective. So buyers, I think getting started early and also versus trying to time the market, trying to have that time in the market approach. And that’s a fairly popular advice for people in the stock market, but also in real estate. If you are somebody watching this and you are thinking about selling a house in King County, you are in the driver’s seat and you have the hottest market that we’ve ever had in this area, and arguably one of the hottest, if not the hottest markets in the entire us and that’s to your advantage. So this is your chance. If you are relocating or downsizing to cash in, get that equity out, move it somewhere else. I would always advise keeping your money invested.

So if you’re not planning to go somewhere, I don’t know if just taking it out is if the strategy, but if you’re thinking short term, Hey, we’re moving out of the area, or I’d like to buy something else, downsize, this may be the best time for that. Thanks so much for watching my King County Real Estate market update for March, 2022. If you made it to the end of this video and you got some value out of this, which I know you did, please consider sharing this video with somebody else who might benefit from it. And if there’s anything that I can do for you specifically related to your real estate needs here in King County, I’d love to be a resource for you.