King County Real Estate Market Update | May 2023

Hey y’all, Zack McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my King County real Estate market update for May, 2023.

Welcome back to another King County real estate market update. And we’re just as a reminder looking back at the data from April. So we’re just taking a quick glance back at where we’ve landed. If you want to see the weekly data, we’re doing the Seattle Real Estate Market watches where we look at King in Snohomish County data for a week snapshot. So those are our weekly ones. This is where we look back and kind of see what happened over the month. And I wanna jump in here. We’re gonna look at the, the stats and then we’re also going to look at where we’re at so far this year, just so we kinda have the perspective. So a little bit of a mid, mid-year check-in, not quite Q1 check-in, but mid-year check-in. So we’ll start with April’s data. And in King County we had a 36% decrease year over year in listings.

Uh, but we also saw a month over month decrease in listings, which is super odd for this time of year. Normally we’re seeing things increasing, but we saw them decreasing. We saw pending sales in King County increase month over month, but down 23.8%. And close sales were also down slightly, pretty much the same as last month, but down significantly year over year, 39.7%. And we’re gonna jump down here and what that, what, what that’s done for us is it’s caused, we’ve seen a slight increase in the supply numbers about 3.4% year over year, but that’s pretty modest compared to what we would’ve expected given that we saw so much more inventory in the spring and summer last year and into the fall. It’s put us at 1.2 months of supply in April. Last year we were at 0.8 months, which is a super low inventory environment and really 1.2 months of supplies are really low inventory environment.

Last month we were at 1.1, so just a slight uptick. But what that’s doing right now is it just means we don’t have a lot of houses available on the market. In a more healthy market, maybe we’re gonna see three to five months of supply, a little more equity with buyers and sellers. And we even saw that last year when we were in the two months range. Buyers had more negotiating power. Houses didn’t all sell for asking price or above, and they don’t really do that, but the majority of them have been. And more recently we’re starting to see that again. We’re starting to see houses sell quicker. The average days on market in King County was 22 this month it was 34 last month and the median number is right around seven. So we’re seeing that these numbers are continuing to drop. So next month I would expect that we would see an even lower average.

And for the median sales price, right down 12.5% year over year, month over month we’re up. So last month we were at 8 48, 3 75, now we’re at 8 75 for the median sales price in King County in April. And we’ve seen the last few months home prices have been climbing and a big, big reason for that is the lower inventory environment buyers entering the market. And it’s not like interest rates have changed that much. We’re still hovering between six and 7%, right around six and a half right now. As of the most recent numbers. Now the average sales price in King County is quite a bit larger. 1,135,000 3 57 versus 8 75. That’s a huge difference and that’s really because there is a wide variety of different types of houses and locations. In King County it’s fairly large and you have some areas where home prices are considerably higher than that median and some that are well below that.

But the average is pulled up because there are more areas that are significantly more expensive, um, than, than not. So um, again, huge delta there. But let’s look at for King County the year to date numbers because I think at this point I’m like where are we at? And I think you’re probably wondering that same thing, right? We’ve had some ups and downs, things have been going up the past few months, but overall for King County, we’ve seen 28.5% fewer listings year to date than we had at the same time last year. We’ve seen 24.6% fewer pending sales than we did last year. We’ve seen 30.2% fewer closings than we did at the same point last year. Days on market, the average is 34 versus 10. Median sales price in King County is down 8.5%. Last year it was nine 15 year to date as of April.

And this year, 8 37 500 average sales price year to date through April last year was 1,192,838. This year, 1,080,213, which is a delta of 9.4%. Houses in King County through April, 2022 we’re selling 11.4% above asking price. This year, homes have been selling for 0.1% above asking price. So pretty much asking price this year, which is a pretty large delta there of 10.1% change. So as we look at King County and we look at the data, we’re seeing that home prices in general are down about 10 to 12%. Again, we’ve talked about that some areas more than others, we’ve seen a significant drop off in the new inventory as far as listings, we’ve seen a drop off an activity, but as we look at the supply numbers, they’re really still low, historically low supply numbers. Now I think as we look at the rest of the year, the biggest things we’re gonna need to look at and pay attention to are going to be, are we going to have a flood of listings in inventory because bioactivity is clearly down.

My answer in my hunch would be no, I don’t think we will. Which would then mean we’re gonna continue to see an environment like this where we have modest pressure on prices and things are continually increasing a little bit. I think what might happen this year is that we won’t have as much of a drop off from the spring and summer in through the fall. That would be my hunch. And again, we’ll see things, things change. This is a prediction based off what I’m seeing and experiencing now, we, we saw a very similar trend in 2020 actually, where things remain relatively stagnant. Now 2020 was a weird year, right? But I would think this year might have some similarities to 2020, mainly because we’re seeing a lot fewer listings than we normally would this time of year. And we may see some of those come back later in the year.

Maybe might have more of that buyer activity later in the year, which would be odd. But 2020 was a very similar year in that case where we had less listing inventory and buyer activity and then it picked up and continued. I think interest rates would have a lot to say with that. So if mortgage interest rates come down, I think that would validate that theory here as we enter the rest of the year. So, um, thanks so much for watching King County Real Estate market update. I hope you got some value from it. I know there are some really loyal listeners to this video and hopefully it was a little bit spicier here with the year to date numbers so far. If you want to see more videos like this and you haven’t subscribed to the channel, please do so. And if you want to buy or sell home in King County and want to have a conversation with me about that, I’d love to have a conversation with you.