King County Real Estate Market Update | September 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 September, 2023.

Well, I’m excited to be back with you here, king County. And when I initially made these videos, I was getting a lot of just requests for conversations and videos about different parts of King County, not just specifically Seattle. And so that’s where this update originated from. And to be honest, I wish I could make videos about every single city and neighborhood and King County, but it’s too much. Really, I don’t have the bandwidth to do that. And so I hope this King County update serves as a general, I guess, perspective for you. But as we all know, each city and location is a little bit different and has a different housing market. So I guess I just wanted to put it out there. If you have questions about where you are at or where you’re looking or considering buying, please feel free to reach out with questions, whether that’s with a call or a chat.

I’m happy to have those conversations on or offline. But as we jump into this update, I think things have changed a lot since last year, but they also have stayed the same. So as we’re looking at the overall market climate, I think number one, there’s a lot less fear in the housing market in general. I think there’s just less fear in the market, and at the same time, prices are right around the same place as they were at the same time last year. Let’s dive into the stats a little bit here. What I want to do is I want to add in the condos a little bit just to give you a little bit of perspective. As a reminder, if you’re newer to these videos, I regularly focus on the residential stats, but don’t get into the condo data as much. But just to give you a rough idea, most of the condos that we’re talking about, not all of them, but a large percentage of the condos are going to be in Seattle and Bellevue in King County.

So let’s talk about listings. We had a 16.7% drop off in listings from last year. New listings coming on the market August, 2022 versus now 2023. If we look at the pending sales down 17.6%, you’ll notice those are very similar, right close sales down 20.6%. The days on market though is down. So we’re at 18 days on market versus 19 last year, days on market was 19 last month. In King County prices though, we talked about how prices have remained similar, and we’re looking at a median sales price in King County of $910,000. That is a whopping $10,000 or 1.1% where we were at the same time last year for the single family homes. If it were to compare that with condos in King County, the median sales price for condos is $525,000, and that’s 8.2% up year over year. Average sales price for condos 692,773, that’s a 17.2% jump over last year.

The average sales price jump for single family houses is significantly less. 7.5% up, right? 1,198,555. And something that I mentioned and I’ve been talking about and we’re starting to see this now, is that the year over year numbers are actually showing up increase, not a decrease increase, whereas earlier in the year, we saw a massive drop off in prices. What we’re seeing is that prices have been stabilizing. That’s what it means. And the crazy thing is prices have been stabilizing, but interest rates are also significantly higher than they were at the same time last year. And if we’re looking at today’s numbers, mortgage news, dailies general survey, and this is the same survey that we talk about in every one of these videos, 7.29% for the 30 year fixed on average. And a lot of that has to do with the commensurate drop and listings and buyer activity, and it’s keeping inventory low.

We have significantly fewer houses on the market. And condos inventories remain similar, only an 8.9% drop off, but for single family houses, 32.9% drop off in the housing inventory in King County. So last summer, we saw a lot more houses on the market and that’s why we were seeing things for selling below asking price. We were seeing people get buy downs on their mortgage rates, sellers paying those four buyers at least temporary buy downs. And now we’re looking at instead of 1.7 months of supply, 1.6 months of supply. Now it’s normal to see supply increase in the spring and summer, but we’re seeing that we’re seeing less of that than we did last year. Condo inventory is up actually 2.2% of supply, but still a lot of pressure on pricing for condos and overall in King County, things are just looking better. I think if you’re seeing prices stabilizing or even going up a little bit, you’re seeing houses selling at asking price.

If you’re seeing inventory numbers remaining about the same, we’re seeing a lot of the signs of things maybe not improving, but if you factor in that interest rates are higher considerably, I would almost consider that and improvement from where we were last year. Now, is the housing market primed to just shoot off into the stratosphere? I think the answer’s no, but I think if we do start to see interest come down, and many are thinking that’s going to be maybe early next year now, and it depends on who you’re listening to, right? Some people are saying it might take a year or two. Now, the Fed has signaled that they may not be dropping rates as quickly for the short-term loans, but again, the Fed funds rate is not what the mortgage rates are based off of for homes. So a lot of people are predicting that.

When we start to see that the Fed is communicating differently about inflation and signaling that they’re done raising rates or maybe even going to start bringing those down in the near future, that’s where we’re going to start to see the downward pressure on the mortgage market. So right now, for now, I think we’re going to be sitting in this space where we have these seven ish percent interest rates. And again, we’re seeing that the market can bear that for now, but lower interest rates will put pressure on housing prices as we saw earlier in the year when they dropped. Thanks so much for watching this month’s King County Real Estate market update. If you enjoyed this video and you want to follow along with these updates on a regular basis, please consider subscribing to the channel. And if you want to talk about buying or selling somewhere in King County or just have questions about the housing market and how it applies to your situation, I’d love to be a resource for you.