King County Real Estate Market Update | October 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 October, 2022.

All right, King County. Let’s jump right into the stats here in this video and we’re gonna talk about the new listings first. We saw a decrease here in September of 7.4% in new listings. Again, September, just for perspective, is typically one of the biggest new listing months and typically the end of the kind of hot listing time. Historically speaking, you start to see quite a few listings in October and then really a lot less in November and December. So I think this is our last big month here in King County for new listings. Pending sales are down even more, 36.2%, so that’s a pretty big drop there in pending sales and close sales also down to 33.6% days on market up a hundred percent, it’s a pretty big jump there. So last year, 13 days on market this year, 26 days on market. So taking about a month on average for a house to sell in King County.

Now this is the one I’m gonna spend a little more time on here this time, and that’s the median sales price. So median sales price in King County is up 6.1% year over year, but as of this month, $875,000. Now if we look back to the high of the year, we’re down 12.6%, right? So King County with all the hoop law is down about 12.6% from the high of the year, and Redfin recently made a article and then it’s kind of all over the news now that Seattle has seen the biggest drop off in prices in the country. All right, so housing prices are down 12.6% here since the high of the year, but up 6.1% from last year. So that’s quite a huge jump from last September that we saw housing prices make and then start to come back down on, if we look at the seasonality of real estate.

So I think it’s important to always have seasonality in perspective. The real estate market historically does drop off from the high of the year into September and usually all the way through the rest of the year. And so I it all the time, but today I’m actually gonna give you some data. So in 2021 we saw home prices drop 5.7%. Now 2021 was one of the hottest markets in the entire country and we saw those values come down 5.7% from the high of the year. If we look at this year, we’re seeing 12.6%, so we’re roughly 6.9% down from the average. So again, the delta there is 6.9%. So we’re seeing quite a bigger drop than we normally do. But if we factor in that seasonality, I think it shows it’s a little less dramatic maybe than we would think. But again, 12.6% is a pretty big haircut from where values were or at least where houses were selling earlier in the year.

So I think there’s opportunity, right? And I’ve been talking about opportunity, opportunity, opportunity, keep an eye out for opportunity. I think if you have the opportunity to buy when market’s down, I think that’s a win if you’re a buyer and right now I’ve been mentioning houses on the market for 26 days, houses are selling below asking price. So the percentage of asking price received 98.7% in September last year, almost 5% above asking price. And so you have the opportunity to negotiate the price down amount of homes on the market. There are more than a hundred percent more houses on the market this year than the same time last year, which equates to almost two months of supply, 1.9 months of supply versus 0.7 months. So if you’re shopping for a house right now, you have a lot more options and relatively no competition.

And so as a buyer, you not only are getting an opportunity to have more houses to choose from, but you’re also having a chance to negotiate the price down and you’re gonna be paying quite a bit less than your friends probably did in the spring. So again, opportunity is in the market right now and I think what’s going to happen here as we near the end of the year, again, typically we see fewer listings on the market. So I think the opportunity window will start to shrink. As far as options I don’t necessarily think we’re gonna see multiple offers and houses selling, you know, way over asking price again, at least not in the short term, but I do think that that means that there’s just gonna be less to choose from. And so buyers will be competing again a little bit over those same narrow amount of houses.

So historically speaking, inventory numbers go down the month, supply goes down in the fall, and I would expect to see something somewhat similar to that here as we head towards the end of the year. Let’s finish off this month with a couple spotlights here. And I always do a spotlight in these videos, but this time we’re gonna talk about the price decreases because we’ve been talking about how countywide we’ve seen these decreases in value. So media and sales price down 12.6% across the county, but here are some places where we were paying and people were paying really large amounts of money to live and this is how much they’ve come down. Okay, so these are gonna be on the east side near Bellevue and I’ve already talked about if you want to hear more about Bellevue and Seattle, I’ve got a separate market update that just kind of focuses in on the big cities, but here for the county, we’re gonna hone in on a few of the suburbs around Bellevue.

So Kirkland, earlier in the year, $1,880,000, median sales price was the high, and as of September $1,350,000 median sales price. So median sales price is up 9% year over year, but down 28.2% from earlier in the year. That’s a massive drop. Now again, up a lot from the same time last year. So if you bought in September, you’re still up 9%, but as far as earlier in the year and in the spring, prices have come down quite a bit. Redmond $1,921,000 was the high earlier in the year down one down to 1 million, $400,000 and again, up 7% year over year. Respectable, right? But down 27.1% from the spring samish, 2,100,000. So over 2 million median sales price earlier in the year. Now down to $1,550,000. Samish is down year over year as well. So 3.1% on the year. and that’s from last September, but down 26.2% from the high earlier in the year.

And then is Aqua is aqua is gonna be our last feature here, 1,763,900 last month, $1,230,000 in is aqua down, 2.4% year over year. Okay? So Sam, a mission is acquired both down year over year, but down 30.3% from earlier in the year. So again, I picked a few of the most pronounced drops from the spring and really if we think back, we’re seeing these year over year numbers and in a couple cases higher, in a couple cases slightly lower, but houses were selling 15 to 30% over asking price in the springtime. And that’s really those jumps and those differences. So a lot of what we’ve seen is housing prices kind of coming back to where they were earlier in the year with these higher interest rates. And I would say also just lack of competition in the market, but home prices haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, but if you were in the market and competing and, and paying those prices earlier in the year, you were essentially paying in the anticipated growth of the market.

and that’s what you do when you’re competing, right? You’re people list a house for a price for a reason, and usually those list prices are based on recent sales nearby. So in the fall, in the winter, typically you have less competition and so you have a little bit more transparent pricing historically, right? if houses are selling for asking price and in a normal 20 to 30 days, that’s you, you know what the market is, it’s easy to look at what the neighbors have sold for and price the house accordingly. But when there’s a lack of inventory and a lot of competition and a lot of people wanting to buy, you have houses priced for what they were selling for a couple months before, but then you have upward pressure on the market. And so that’s what we saw into the spring and now we’re far from that, but kind of back to where we were earlier in the year and maybe even at the end of 2021.

So even Bellevue, Bellevue’s Media and Sales price of 1,650,000 is exactly the same as it was December, 2021, so at the end of last year. So as far as where the market’s headed here for the rest of the year, I would say that I think we’re gonna see inventory numbers come down a little bit. I think we’re gonna see mortgage rates kind of stay in a similar realm as they are currently. They could go up a little bit more though, so brace yourself. They might go up, but they’re super volatile right now. Earlier in the week they we’re in the mid sixes and now they’re back up over seven. And I think we’re just gonna see a lot of volatility there in the mortgage market, just like we’re seeing in the stock market here at least for a little bit while longer.

So if you wanna talk more about your situation, if you’re somebody and a lot of people are this time of year considering maybe a purchase or even a sale earlier in 2023, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m happy to be a resource and help kind of walk through and talk through what’s going on in the market, how that applies to your situation. Does it make sense for you to think about jumping in and taking advantage of these opportunities, or does it make sense for you to sit it out, kind of see what happens? So I’m happy to have a conversation like that if you’re interested. And if you haven’t subscribed yet to the channel and you wanna see more videos like this, please do so.