King County Real Estate Market Update | October 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 October, 2021. As we dive into the numbers here for King County, and again we’re looking at numbers from last month, so September, 2021. As we look at these numbers though, we’re gonna start to see the trend I predicted earlier on in the year and that’s that these numbers are gonna start to look a little less ridiculous as time goes on. And what I mean is that instead of seeing 20, 30, 40% above year over year prices, we’re gonna start to see a little bit more of a normal amount and still really, really hot market. But instead of seeing those higher numbers as a county, we’re starting to see numbers that are hot and, and we’re starting to see significant year over year growth, but not quite as crazy or as drastic as what we were seeing earlier on in the year.

And a lot of that I mentioned in previous updates is because we had the slowdown in the spring when Covid started and then we saw a mad rush towards the end of the year. And that’s continued on here into 2021. And so the earlier spring numbers were the super hot housing market over a little bit cooler of a housing market. But what we’ll find as we get to the end of this update and I talk a little bit more about specific cities in King County, there are definitely places where you’re still seeing those huge year over year gains specifically on the east side. So let’s go through the stats here real quick. We’re gonna talk about the single family stats in King County, again from September, 2021. We’re going to talk about some specific cities in King County where housing prices are continuing to blow up.

And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about some application for you at the end. So new listings last month in King County, 3089, which is just up from last year. We have pretty much the same amount of new listings coming on the market this year as we did last year in September. Pending sales are down slightly 2.9%. We are seeing close sales down 10.9%, so not quite as much buying activity this year if we were to compare with last year. And then days on market though significantly down. So 31.6% down. And that’s really 19 days on market on average last year versus 13 days on market this year. As we look at median sales price 8 29, 498, so almost $830,000 compared to last year’s, $750,000 median sales price. So 10.6% growth year over year. I mentioned earlier, not quite as substantial as we were seeing earlier in the year, but still a really healthy amount year over year. Average sales price is up 18.1% in King County. So we’re seeing more and more of a pull towards the more expensive houses, but the

Median number is still drugged down. So there’s still a good variety of expensive houses and more affordable homes in King County. Percentage of list price received 5% over asking price on average across all of King County. And there are specific places we’ll talk about them towards the end, where homes are selling 10% or more easily every single time. But across the county, we’re seeing an average of 5% above asking price inventory of homes for sale. We’ve seen a substantial drop. Last year we had about 2,600 homes on the market and now we’re at about 1650. So we’ve seen a 37% drop in listings year over year and that’s caused our supply number of inventory as far as how many houses are on the market versus how many buyers there are to go from 1.2 months of supply down to 0.7 months of supply, which if we look at last month in August, slightly up 0.1, <laugh> we’ve had just a few more houses currently on the market than we did at the same time last year.

But as I’m walking through this with clients and making offers and negotiating offers, we’re still seeing lots and lots of competition and that’s because there’s really just not enough houses for everybody. And even yesterday I made an offer with clients 23 offers on this house, and I wish I could say we won, but my clients made their best offer that they could. They went up to the top of their budget, they were looking at houses more than 20% below what their top walkaway point was and still somebody came in and beat them. So there’s just a crazy housing market out there in King County still, especially as we head over to the east side, which is what I wanna highlight in my update this month. And each month I try to talk about different parts of King County and I can’t cover everybody every single time, but this time I want to talk specifically about the East side.

So when I say the East side, I’m meaning the east side of Lake Washington, so places over by Bellevue, so that’s gonna be Redmond, Kirkland, iswas, Amish. As we look at the stats for the houses on the east side, they blow out of the water. The rest of King County, the rest of King County is relatively in that 10 to 20% over last year. And Seattle specifically where a majority of the houses in King County are Seattle’s only up 4%, 4.1% year over year. median sales price 8 32 in the city of Seattle. And it’s the city of Seattle is fairly large compared to the rest of King County and the other cities. But Seattle’s only appreciated 4% year over year. As far as median sales price is concerned, if we look at Bellevue Bellevue’s home prices, median home prices are up 43.5% year over year.

And remember what we talked about at the beginning, we talked about how we’re starting to see the, the Covid effect go away because we’re still seeing these large jumps over what were already substantial jumps and hot times in the market. So now these numbers are starting to feel a little bit more real and tangible. They’re not a dip. And then a, and then a jump. It’s actually the jump over the jump from last year. Bellevue’s Media and sales price though was $1,814,400. So getting close to 2 million. And now places like Mercer Island or over in Medina, you’re gonna see home prices even higher. But there are very few houses in Medina and Mercer Island isn’t selling a ton of houses every month either. Bellevue’s kind of the big one over on the east side, but as we look at Redmond, we’re seeing $1.3 million median sales price, 34.4% up year over year.

Sam Amish had some clients look in there right now. 1.6 million median sales price, 44.1% up year over year. Crazy that’s even more than Bellevue. Woodenville 20.3% up year over year, $1.2 million. Kenmore, it’s a little bit more on the north side, still up 27.8% up at just over a million dollars and is aqua 32.7% up year over year at 1.257 million. And Duval quite a bit cheaper, 849,000, but still up 29.7%. So we’re seeing across the east side continual upward trend in prices. As I think about it, a lot of people that are living in, or were living in Seattle or maybe even on the north side in the suburbs that wanted to get something newer, nicer, bigger lot, you could look up north, but the houses on the east side tend to have bigger yards, even be even nicer, even more grand. The planned developments, there’s a lot more planned neighborhoods and developments over on the east side in these cities that I just talked about.

Or you’ve got home on real acreage. If you’re heading up into the suburbs on the north side, you’re gonna find newer houses than you’ll find in Seattle itself, but you’re still gonna have more of the city type lots, maybe a little bit bigger, maybe 10,000 square foot lots, but you’re not gonna see, you know, a third of an acre, a half an acre, a full acre as often as you’re gonna see if you head over to the east side. So I think for the people that are really down and out, maybe with covid, O V I D, if you want to call it that, and wanting to treat themselves to a nice house, a bigger space, the east side is a natural place to go look for those things. And it’s also already was competitive, so you’ve kind of got this increased competition there. And I think as we look into the future, we’re gonna

Continue to see a lot of growth on price over on the east side in these places that I just talked about. And we can even throw in Kirkland. Kirkland didn’t see quite as much growth. Kirkland in general has a little bit smaller lots feels a little bit more like the North end, but also still on the east side. So take that with a green of salt. But we didn’t see quite as much growth in Kirkland and part of that’s because the price was already pretty high there. But I think if we throw in Kirkland and the rest of the East side, we’re gonna continue to see this growth here. partly because of the exclusivity. I mean 23 offers on a house in Sam Amish the other day, and I’m just not seeing that same amount of activity in Linwood or Edmonds. I’m even seeing houses sitting on the market in Edmonds and Linwood and some of these other places where people were flocking to and still want to buy houses, but it’s just not nearly as competitive as some of these King County cities on the east side.

So if I’m to look into the future and pull out the crystal ball a little bit, dust it off as we know, I don’t really have one of those. I think we’re gonna continue to see people moving to the east side, or at least home prices continue to climb as people compete over houses. There. I will, however, here, give a quick shout out to the South end as well because we’re seeing a lot of these places in that 15 to 20% year over year growth. So big shout out to the south end, anywhere South Iberian Sea Tac, all the way down to Kent Covington, Auburn. Lots and lots of growth there as well. But if we were to look and compare, we’re seeing quite a bit more on the east side. Thanks so much for watching Mike King County market update for October, 2021. If this video brought you some value, please subscribe to my channel so you can see more of these videos on a regular basis if you haven’t already. And if you know somebody who could benefit from this material, please consider sharing it with them.