King County Real Estate Market Update | May 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 May, 2021. Before we jump into this update, I want to preface this video by saying that these stats that we’re going to be talking about are coming from April, 2021. We get the stats at the beginning of the month and we’re talking about them here on this video. And in this video we are going to go through residential and also condo stats in King County. I’ll share a little bit of my thoughts as we go through. This will be a shorter video though, so if you want to see more in-depth thoughts about the Seattle area in general, I have another video and I’ll link it up below. It’s the Seattle Real Estate Market update for May, 2021, and you’ll find all the information you want and even more of my commentary in that video.

Now let’s jump into the stats for King County. And as we go through this update, I’ll make sure to highlight things that I think might be interesting or noteworthy. And as we look at new listings, last month we had 3,508 new listings in King County, which is up 72.6% year over year. Crazy. And what I’m seeing is a lot of these stats are a little inflated when it comes to amount of homes coming on or prices. So just for context, as you’re watching this video last year about this same time and in April we saw a severe slowdown in the amount of homes coming on the market. It was kind of right as the Covid 19 pandemic was starting to become a big deal, at least in our area. And we also were starting to see home prices decline a little bit. So the numbers that we’re going to talk about are going to be a little bit skewed.

Now, back to the stats. Pending sales were also up. We had an 86.5% increase in pending sales. We saw a 63.5% increase in closed sales and and homes we’re selling on average 11 days on market. And let’s pause just for a sec. I mentioned the inflated numbers a little bit here when it comes to inventory and closings. We had a bunch of new listings come on the market and for perspective, in April this year, we had 3,508 new listings in King County. If we look back at 2019, so we’ll skip over 2020 cuz it was a little bit of a weird year. We had 3,284 new listings. And if we go back to 2018 when inventory was a little bit tighter, and the last time we kind of think of spring 2018 was the hottest our market had ever been, we had 2,967 listings come on the market. So if we’re looking at just perspective-wise, we actually had a lot more listings come on in King County even than we did over the previous couple years. So it wasn’t just last year that we beat, we’ve had a lot of listings coming on, but we’re

Still home selling quickly. So we’re seeing an average of 11 days and we’re seeing prices continue to climb. So in King County as a whole, we saw home selling 9.4% above the asking price. And we saw a median sales price in all of King County $830,000. And the average sales price over 1000001.04, 4 million. So we’re seeing home prices jumping, we’re seeing inventory remaining low. So we have 0.6 months of supply of homes available, super, super low. And the biggest reason it’s not because we don’t have people listing their house. I think that’s a misconception. We say, Hey, we need more inventory. We do, we def definitely need more inventory and we need more homes on the market. But we’re starting to see that we’re seeing a significant amount of new homes on the market. And compared to close sales, we had 2,633 close sales last month and we had 3,508 new listings.

We had considerably more new listings than we had closed sales and we even had more new listings than pending sales. 2,991. Now, if we look at the numbers, we’ve probably had some listings that came on at the end of the month that are now pending as of the beginning of May. So pretty much everything that’s coming on the market is getting taken and that’s because we have a lot of buyers in the market. Now let’s talk about the condo market here really quickly because it’s a little bit different than the residential market. In King County, we had about 1023 new listings in the condo space. This is a 94.5% increase. Okay, almost double the amount of condos came on the market in April versus the same time last year. We also saw a significantly larger number of pending sales too. We had almost 900 condos sell in King County, which is 148.5% more <laugh>.

So last year we had 361 condos. Now do you think a lot of people were trying to buy a condo a month and a half into a shutdown and a pandemic? Probably not. So I think these numbers here specifically are skewed and we will probably see a little bit more of a reset, but we’re still seeing more condos moving regardless based on historical numbers. But last year in specific, king County was pretty shut down and most of the condos are going to be in Seattle, a significant portion of them. And people weren’t trying to live in downtown Seattle last year in April. So there wasn’t as much movement there. We’re starting to see that movement. Now, a couple more interesting stats here for condos, we’ve had 24 days on market versus 17 last year. So condo homes are taking a little bit longer to sell right now. We also see a little bit more supply. 1.2 months, not a big deal. But in comparison to the residential side where we have 0.6 months of supply, that’s twice as many condos available versus the single

Family houses. So a little less of that crazy competition. But still the average sales price for condos is up 11.6%. You have an 8.1% increase in the median sales price and you have condos selling for 2.5% above the asking price. So regardless of the amount of inventory and the shift, maybe in people’s perceptions, maybe permanently or at least for the the near term, we’re still seeing condos on average selling just above the asking price. I didn’t dive into the specific condo stats and metrics from previous years or specific markets, but what we’ve seen over the past few months is that Seattle itself is dragging down this percentage over asking price. The Seattle condos have on average been a little bit softer, the condo market and everywhere else in King County has still been pretty hot. Before we recap this market update, I wanna share with you a few of the markets in King County right now that are at the hottest.

And we’ll look at Seattle first because it’s not the hottest, but it’ll give you a good reference point. So the city of Seattle, we’re looking at a new median sales price record 8 55 last month with home values being up or the median sales price being up 6.9% year over year. Now if we look at a few of these other places, you’ll see, oh man, it’s a lot hotter in these markets. So if we look at Bellevue, Bellevue’s, median sales price was up. This is, this is crazy. 49.8% year over year, and you didn’t hear me wrong. Median sales price last month in Bellevue was 1,640,000. If we look at Kirkland, home prices in Kirkland were up 55% year over year. According to the median sales price numbers. The median sales price in Kirkland was $1,395,000. We had a few other markets, and this is pretty typical among King County.

We’ve got shoreline up 23.6%, some Amish up, 29.8% is aqua 30.5% increase on the median sales price. Bothel, which is kind of split between King and Snohomish County, 28.4% increase and then Redmond 26.3%. So everywhere else, at least a lot of the major markets in King County are seeing pretty drastic increases on the prices. But as we’re looking at Seattle, not quite as crazy. So what we’re finding is people are wanting to live outside of the city of Seattle right now, at least as a general theme as we wrap up our King County update here, I want to leave you with a few thoughts for buyers. I think we’ve still got really low interest rates and there’s still a lot of competition. As we’re looking over the stats, we’re still seeing houses in King County selling almost 10% above asking price on average. And if you’re in some of the more desirable places in King County, you’re seeing even closer to 15% above asking price. So homes are still selling way over asking price. It’s still super, super competitive, but we

Are to see some more houses coming on the market. So it doesn’t mean that you won’t have less competition, but there will at least be more selection available to you. And hopefully over time we’ll start to see a little bit less competition as some of the buyers that have been waiting for months to get into a house, to start getting into a house. And I have that same hope for some of my clients who have been looking and not, maybe not as aggressively as some to get into a house here in the coming months. Now, if you’re a seller and you’re watching this video, you still have an opportunity to capitalize on the highest prices that we’ve ever had in King County and also the competition in multiple offer situations. If you find yourself watching this video, you made it all the way to the end. First off, thank you so much for your attention. I value it highly. Secondly, if you found value in this video and you want to see more videos like this one or other videos about the Seattle area housing market, please subscribe to my channel. And lastly, if you have questions about your own situation, whether you’re thinking about buying or selling a house here in King County, I’d love to be a resource for you.