Seattle Real Estate Market Update | December 2019
Video Summary
Here are my latest thoughts on the Seattle Real Estate Market: The number of homes for sale in Seattle will continue to shrink as we finish out the holiday season and 2019. As a result, we may see increased buyer competition to start the new year. In this video, I share a client story, current stats from the Seattle Real Estate Market, and applications for buyers and sellers in the market.
Relevant links
- Last month’s market update – Seattle Real Estate Market Update November 2019
Video Transcript
Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my December, 2019 Seattle real estate market update. Today we’re going to talk about a story from some past clients last month. We’re going to talk about the stats from November, 2019 and we’re going to talk about some relevant application to you, coming up.
This one story we’re going to talk about, Dom and Sam, they are first time home buyers who just purchased their first home in Edmonds right down the street from mine. They were super fun to work with, partly because they were referred to me by another friend, Josh Moore, Josh and Katie, thank you so much for the referral. I really appreciate it.
When I met with Dom and Sam the first time, there were lots of fears, lots of questions and that’s super typical for somebody purchasing their first house. And we hashed it out in that first meeting. And really throughout the process there were lots of questions, lots of answers and I even had to talk them out of buying a house and I don’t have to do that often, but there was one where we spent 45 minutes on the phone going back and forth, pros, cons about the house. And it ended with there’s going to be a better house and eventually a couple of weeks later we found the perfect house for them.
It’s right down the street from some of their best friends and it’s also right down the street from me, which is kind of fun. So congratulations Dom and Sam. Again, super fun to work with you guys. And if you’re watching this and you’ve got a lot of questions and you have a lot of fears about buying your first home, I’d love to answer those. Feel free to reach out to me. You can find my contact info in the about page or down in the description below.
All right, now it’s time for the Seattle real estate market stats. I know this is everybody’s favorite part of the video, so got to make sure that we cover this as well. Last month in Seattle, so we’re talking about November, 2019 stats, the median sales price in Seattle was 725,000. And last month they talked about how we were slightly up year over year. This month well, we were slightly down year over year 2.3%. This year, we saw numbers as big as 10% down in the spring and early summer and now we’re seeing that gap narrowing like I talked about earlier in the year and I still think as we get towards the end of the year, we are almost there, by the way.
The next month stats we’re going to be right at or just a little above where we were at the same time last year, but stay tuned for the January market update for that. Here are a couple other relevant stats from last month. The first one here is new listings on the market in Seattle, 470 new listings, which is 18.7% down from last month. The amount of pending sales though was also up 28.5% last month. The amount of closed sales up 21.5%. And that resulted in a Delta of 24.7 almost 25% less homes on the market this time of the year versus last time of the year, which is interesting. The market always towards the end of the fall and into the winter you’ll see a decline in inventory and what we haven’t seen is inventory numbers below one month since last year and what we saw last year, we saw a bunch of new homes coming on the market.
There was a little bit of a “ahhh” moment in the spring in 2018. And then we saw inventory numbers continue to rise beyond where they had been and we saw home prices take a dive as a result of that plus interest rates rising. And so this year we’ve seen interest rates come down again. We’re down, according to Freddie Mac’s most recent data, we’re down over 1% on interest rates year over year from the same time last year.
And we’ve also seen those inventory numbers continue declining to, well I wouldn’t say healthy number, we’ve seen them returning to the seller’s favor. We’re down at 1.3 months of supply so we have less supply again, and I suspect that we’ll see that number continue to decline on next month stats. So stay tuned. We might jump below a month of supply, but we also have interest rates still really low, so that’s been fueling the market this year. Whereas last year we kind of saw the opposite effect which had a negative impact on the prices.
One more note with the stat from last month is the median days on market. We saw median days on market of 17 last month, which is down about 10.5% from the same time last year. But what’s interesting is the average days on market is actually higher, 12.9% than last year. So we’re at 35 days average on market versus the 17 median. So median is the middle number between low and high averages, the well average of the two. So really what we’re seeing is certain homes are selling a lot faster. That could be priced, that could be features, that could be location. And then you’ve got certain homes that are just sitting a lot longer. So last year the market was pretty slow this time of year. And this year we’re seeing some houses selling quicker and we’re also seeing some houses so in a little bit slower.
So a little bit of an interesting dynamic. There’s homes that have been listed for 70, 80, 90 days right now, but then there’s a bunch that are still selling in a week. Now let’s finish off with a few applications here for you. So first of all I recorded a video a few days back about some holiday hot takes for the Seattle housing market. So if you want to go check out that video, we’ll put it up here on the screen. Definitely worth your time. And I cover a few of these points in there as well. And the first message out there is this, that interest rates are down year over year significantly were according to Freddie Mac stats down over 1% on those interest rates. And what that does is it makes housing more affordable for buyers and if you’re looking to buy your mortgage is going to be considerably lower with that percentage difference in the mortgage rates.
And I’ve had clients that bought the same time last year, even a little bit into the winter that have already refinance their mortgage because they’re able to save so much money with today’s rates. And to be honest, last year’s rates weren’t even really high on a long term scale, still relatively low on the mortgage rates, but as of more recently they were pretty high. So definitely take advantage of those rates if you can and you’re thinking about getting into the market.
The other thing is inventory is going to continue to shrink. So if you’re a buyer right now, this is the time of year where there really isn’t as many homes coming on the market. A lot of people on the selling side are just taking a little bit of a break. I mean there’s not a lot of people that want to prep their house for sale right before Christmas and in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So usually we see very few houses coming on the market at this time of year. We see that almost every single year and this year I think we’ll be no exception.
And if last month was any indicator, we saw significantly fewer homes come on the market in November than we did the year before. So I would expect we would see something like that in December. And that’s why I’m thinking we might see those housing numbers deep below the one month of supply number because we have a lot more people buying up the homes and there are homes available. So what that means as a buyer is that you’re really not going to see super exciting houses every day. And so there’s a few of my clients personally right now that want to buy a house ASAP, but there aren’t a lot of listings to look at.
So as an expectation, if you’re paying attention to the market, looking at Redfin or Zillow or whatever site you’re using, you’re probably not going to see a bunch of your favorite houses coming on the market. They’ll probably be holding off until the new year to put it on the market. But if you do, it’s probably a motivated seller because they just need to get their house sold.
There is also opportunity if you’re a buyer at this time because the homes that are on the market have either been on for a while, so people are probably a little bit more willing to negotiate or if they’re just putting it on the market, they’re probably pretty motivated if they’re going to be getting their house on the market during the holidays. Well, we’re wrapping up my last Seattle real estate market update for 2019 it’s been an awesome year here in the real estate market and for me personally, as I wrap up these next few weeks, I’m going to be spending a lot of time with my family on a personal level and also thinking about goals for 2020 putting some solid plans down for those.
So if you find yourself in that same boat in buying or selling or some kind of combination is in the plan for 2020, I’d love to bring you some value in your own individual situation specifically, if you’ve gotten value from these videos, I’d love to be able to translate that and bring even more value to you on a personal level. And of course, if this video has been valuable for you, please subscribe to my channel that’s how we get the word out. That’s how more people see these videos and benefit from them as well. And as always, thank you so much for your attention. I value it highly. Talk to you soon!
