King County Real Estate Market Update | October 2023

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my King County real Estate market update for October 2023.

What’s up, King County? If you’re new to these updates, welcome. We’re going to go over the most recent stats from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service from last month in King County, and we focus on the residential stats. In this video you’ll also see that I have condo stats on here, so if you’re curious, you can take a glance there. But what we’ll do today is we’re going to go through the most recent stats and compare month over month, year over year. But we’ll also spend a little time looking at the year to date numbers because well quarter three just ended. Let’s jump into the residential stats here in King County and new listings in King County. We’re up month over month, which is normal to see that from August to September, but down 19.9% year over year.

I think looking at the year over year numbers by the way, is really helpful when you’re looking at real estate data because real estate is by nature, seasonal, and so when you compare the month over month numbers, yes, it’s helpful to see the changes, but there are seasonal changes and normal changes in any given year. So we saw what I would’ve expected. More listings come on the market in September. I would tell you I would expect to see fewer when we get to the November update and we look at October’s data. Pending sales also dropped month over month, and so did close sales in September. The year over year change though pending sales was only 3.6% down, but the close sales down 24.8%, which tells me that some of these pending sales were towards the end of the month, so I would suspect that those would be maybe closings in October.

There are still houses that are coming out of contract that was less common when the market was super hot. People waving inspection, you still have some houses coming back on, but a lot of the pending sales are going to end up closed here, just probably in October. I would say days on market, 22 last month up from 18 in August, but down year over year, 12% last year, 22 days this year, 25 days last year on market. Now this is where it gets really interesting because King County’s median sales price is down slightly from last month at 910,000, but up 2.3% year over year. So last September, the median sales price in King County was 880,000 for residential homes, and this year it was 900. So prices are actually up year over year. And if we look at average sales price, average sales price is also up 0.7%, so not a very large difference there. Percentage of list price received last year homes in King County, were selling for 98.7% of their list price. And we’re seeing that this year they’re selling for the full list price, which is a slight increase, 1.3%. The inventory, though, that’s the houses available on the market, we had a drop off of 31.9%. That’s a really large drop off in inventory, but it didn’t translate to the supply of inventory. So we have the inventory of homes for sale as one stat, but we also look at the months of supply of inventory. And if we look at the month supply of inventory 1.9 months last year versus 1.8 months this year, even though we had a massive drop off in the amount of homes, we’ve also had a relatively commensurate drop off in the sales activity or the buyer activity, which is why we find ourselves only seeing a 5.3% drop off in the actual month.

Supply numbers. I will say this as well, just to clarify, the 1.8 months of supply is a slight uptick from 1.6 in August. Again, a normal thing to see where supply starts to pick up a little bit towards the end of the summer slash early fall. This number will unless something weird happens, go down in the winter as we head into the new year. Now, let’s do a quick recap here for year to eight numbers because I think this will give a good picture and show kind of what we’ve been talking about here in the King County housing market. So overall for the whole year, new listings are down 30%. We’ve seen 21.5% fewer pending sales or offers made that are accepted. We’ve seen a 26.5% drop off in closed sales. So again, that closed sales number is a very similar drop off to the drop off in new listings, we’ve seen a 92.3% increase in the days on market. I think I’m just going to say this, I think the days on market number is a little skewed, and not that the data itself is wrong, but it’s factoring in early 2022 into this number. When you see the 13, when we look back at last September, we’re seeing 25 days on market. So we know that it wasn’t that quick at the end of the year, but earlier in the year, things were selling really quickly, whereas this year we had things selling and taking a long time to sell, and those numbers have been declining. So again, overall year to date, it’s been taking longer to sell a house in King County.

Now, if we look at the median sales price, again, averaged over a nine month period, we see a 4.8% drop off from 2022 to 2023, and in the average sales price, we see a 4.2% drop off. If we were to look at just the King County peak price to now, we’re going to see closer to a 10% drop off in prices from the peak. But again, averaged out over the entire year about 4.8% down from the previous year, and then the listing price percentage. So last year at the beginning of the year, homes were selling relatively quickly and over asking price, and so the average through September of last year was 5.9% above asking price. And this year, even with things slowing down, we’re still seeing an average of 0.8% above asking price for the whole year. Well, that wraps up the data section here of the King County Housing market update. And as we look at the rest of the year, I think what we’re going to see in King County is a decline in supply.

We’re going to see less listings coming on the market. There are just statistically fewer people that are going to list during the holidays, and that might even be more dramatic this year than in some, and I think we’re going to see buyers that are opportunistic and wanting to take advantage of the decline in prices getting into the market, maybe even starting their searches a little bit earlier to get a jumpstart on the inventory coming on the market. What I’ve found is that buyers that get started earlier tend to be ready to go and competitive and ready to make a purchase when the inventory does increase, and the buyers that wait to get started until then, they’re the ones that are losing out to the people that are already ready to go. So it just takes a little bit longer for buyers if they wait until the new year to get started for that purchase. So I would suspect that some will get started now or at least start to take steps towards buying here this fall. So that’s my thoughts as we wrap up this update. I think next month we’re going to see that the inventory is declining and not super rapidly, but as we head into the holidays, we’re going to find ourselves and what I would say a relatively slow moving Seattle housing market.