King County Real Estate Market Update | March 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 March, 2023.

Today we’re gonna look at the data from February, 2023. We’re also going to give special attention to a few places that were requested by popular demand, including Renton, Snoqualmie, and North Bend. All right, let’s look at the data for this last month. And in King County, we saw the number of listings increase slightly. Um, and at the same time, we saw a massive dropoff year over year of 32.6% Pending sales were down 20.8% year over year, but also up slightly from last month. So we’re starting to see that activity pick up, and if you’ll notice that there’s a lot bigger drop off in the new listings versus the pending sales, and that’s causing us to stay in this relatively low inventory environment. It may be short-lived as it’s the beginning of the year and people start to make those New Year’s resolutions and make good on them, but at this point, we had more pending sales than we did new listings, and we’re still seeing those inventory numbers dropping.

Close sales were down 14.7% year over year, but again, up considerably from January, days on market, 42 days on market on average. But I will point out in King County, 20 days was the median, and we saw a pretty steep drop off here last month from the median, the prior month, which is just showing that the listings are starting to sell quite a bit quicker. The new ones, at least as they come on the market, maybe they’re priced better. Some of the other ones though, are still sitting on the market or have been sitting on the market pulling that average up. But the median’s shrinking, which is that first sign that things are starting to sell quicker. Median sales price down 8% year over year, and the year over year numbers are going to be interesting this year as we head up into the spring and the early summer, because well, prices have been down for a while.

I saw a recent Seattle Times article that said home prices in King County are down year over year for, you know, for the first time since 2020. Well, they’ve been down for quite a while already, news flash, but now we’re starting to see it reflected in the data. 800,000 was the median sales price in King County. The average was 1,000,020 6,478, which was up month over month. So King County actually saw prices going up for median and average sales price, but the average sales price was also down 8.1% year over year. So compared to last year down, but compared to last month, slightly up percentage of list price received this the most exciting, well, not really <laugh> one, but over 11%, 11.5% over asking price last year at the same time, 99.3% of asking price in February this year. And I would say that’s really close to asking price.

We were seeing things selling a lot lower and a lot farther below the asking price, and that number is inching up. It’s a big delta from last year, but we are seeing a lot more houses selling for asking price or right around asking price. A lot less of those really big discounts. But again, it’s already priced in. In most cases. Inventory of homes for sale up considerably, 92.8% up year over year in King County supplies up 200%, but it’s still under a month of supply, which is historically really, really low. So we saw the supply numbers up over two months of supply in the summer and in the early fall, and now we’re down to 0.9 months of supply now compared to last year at 0.3 months, well, it seems like a massive jump, but I will say that we’re in a very, very low inventory environment.

Again, as we enter into the spring selling season, let’s pay special attention to a few places in King County. And these were requested by some of the viewers. I don’t mean to not pay attention to certain areas and give more attention to others, but it does happen. So we’re gonna look at Renton first. All right. Rent in’s. Median sales price last month for single family homes was $682,000, which is down 14.8% year over year. Last year, homes in Renton were selling at 12.9% above their asking price. And this last month, 97.9% of the original asking price. So that factors in price reduction, so quite a big delta in Renton, we had at the end of the month 0.6 months of supply and Renton. So again, really low inventory environment, and if we’re looking at the days on market, over 40 is the average, but again, that median number is 26.

So we saw the drop off in Renton just like we did in King County for the speed of sale. So things are picking up in Renton as well, but at this point, we’re seeing about 15% down year over year. Next up on our list is Snoqualmie, and the median sales price last year was $1,345,000 down 36.4% year over year, 855,000 last month. Huge drop off in Snow Kwame, snow qualies, percent of list price. Original asking price, factoring in any price reduction, 95.5% last month, last year, 14.9% above asking price, the original asking price. That is a massive, massive adjustment 0.8 months of supply. So supply’s still low. Inno Kwame, 48 days is the average days on market. Again, median is lower, so we’re get starting to see things picking up, but still 36.4%, that’s a huge difference from what people were paying last year. Last but not least, we’re gonna look at North Bend.

And last year the median sales price was 1,000,050 $5,852 this year, 985,000 median sales price. The original asking price percentage, 95.5%, same as Snow. Kwame actually this last month, 12.5% above asking price last year. So still a very large delta between those percentages. Average days on market in North Bend 52, which is the largest of our three here, but median days on market 14. That is a huge difference. And again, same month’s data just means that we’re starting to see things sell faster, right? There’s a lot more selling quicker. I think those are the new listings, but there’s still quite a bit that’s been sitting on the market for a while. Median days on market has been dropping in all three of these places. So I think across King County, I mentioned that, that the median days on market is dropping and dropping fairly substantially, and those averages will be pulled down.

I think a lot of it has to do with the low inventory and a lot of the people with their New Year’s resolutions getting back into buying a house. I think the fact that we have so much fewer listings right now than we even did last year in the year before when things were pretty tight, but we still have some of that activity. It’s keeping things going. We’re not seeing as much of a drop off as we were seeing, or maybe some thought we might see here. So again, we’re seeing really negative numbers as far as the year over year numbers, but things are picking up because they are improving from where they were. Thanks so much for watching my King County market update for this month. If you got some value out of this content, please give it a thumbs up. And if you want to see more videos like this on a regular basis, please subscribe to the channel.