Seattle Real Estate Market Update | June 2021
Video Summary
Here are my latest thoughts on the Seattle Real Estate Market: Seattle has a new median sales price record yet again! We are seeing more new homes on the market, some of the highest numbers in recent memory, but buyer demand is still greater than the influx of new homes for sale. Homes continue to sell quickly and above the asking price, especially outside of the Seattle city limits.
- Last month’s market update – Seattle Real Estate Market Update May 2021
Video Transcript
Hey, y’all. It’s Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle real estate market update for June, 2021. If you’re new to these updates, welcome. I film a Seattle real estate market update every single month and post them to the channel, so if you want to see these videos on a monthly basis, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button before you continue.
All right, now let’s get into the normal flow of these market updates. We’re going to start off with a story. Last month, I got to help a client purchase a new construction house off market. And what that means is we were able to find him a house that he liked before it was listed for sale and all of the buyers and competition started up. He was referred to me by a past client. Newsome family, thank you so much for the referral, and we were starting to search for new construction or newer townhouses and we found a project that is nearing completion in the Crown Hill neighborhood. So we were able to negotiate an off-market purchase for him, the first one in the complex, and it’s going to be closing here in about a month and a half. Safe to say, he’s extremely excited about this purchase and the ability to buy it without having to compete against other buyers, so if you find yourself watching this and that speaks to you in some way, you’re thinking about new construction in Seattle or the surrounding area, I’d be happy to be a resource for you as well.
Now, let’s jump into the stats, which is why I know many of you watch these videos. And just like we’ve been talking about all year, we’re continuing to see an upward trend in housing prices and competition level. If we look at the median sales price number for the City of Seattle as a whole, we had a pretty, pretty large increase here, 18.8% year over year. New median sales price record of $890,000 for single-family residential homes in the city. If you look at some of the suburbs on the west side Shoreline, 26.4% up year over year. Edmonds was up 26.6% year over year, and Lynnwood was up 40.2% year over year.
If we jump on over to the east side and we look at Bellevue, Bellevue’s median sales price was $1.6 million last month in May, up 54.2% year over year. Kirkland was up 40%, Redmond was up 53.1% and Bothell was up 38.2%. And prices, if we’re looking at west side to east side, what you’ll find on the west side is that you’ll see prices a little bit lower and a little bit more reasonable if you want to call it that. If you jump over to the east side, prices are going to be about 40 to 50% higher if you’re looking at the same latitude. So prices in Seattle and the suburbs on the west side are going to be a little bit more accessible, mainly because they’re older. And you’re going to find newer houses mixed in, but there’s a lot of older development.
You move over to the east side, you’ve got some newer developments, newer communities, and you also have a little bit more of an established tech hub over there in Microsoft and that area has been booming here for a while. So overall, the prices in the area are continuing to skyrocket. Seattle itself, if we look at the numbers, is not appreciating as fast as everywhere else, but we’re still seeing pretty dramatic increases in Seattle and as a whole. And I think something to consider as we’re talking about the stats this month is that we’re still, last year if we jumped back, we’re still in the middle of the fear. In the beginning of the pandemic, people are still adjusting to wearing masks at showings, there’s no hope of a vaccine, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to happen in the real estate market and in the stock market so people are not putting their houses on the market, and we’ll talk about that here in a minute.
We’re seeing prices going down a little bit last year in general, year over year. So the stats we’re talking about now are a reflection of the jump from where they were when they were depressed a little bit and now to their new record heights. So if we look at 2019, home prices are up considerably since then but not quite as dramatically. So just as we’re looking at the stats, keep in mind, last year, the numbers were a little bit lower and now, we’re taking a quantum leap forward with the heat of the market.
If we look at new listings in Seattle last month, we saw a pretty big increase year over year, but again, we have to take into consideration, there were just fewer people wanting to sell their house last year. So really, what we see this year is more of a return to normal than an explosion of new listings. It’s been pretty average as far as the amount of houses coming on the market, so we do have pretty low supply. We have a very, very low amount of homes on the market, and we’ll continue talking about that here in a minute, but as far as the houses coming on, it’s not like we’re not having houses come on the market. We’re just not having enough to keep up with the demand.
Speaking of demand, if we look at pending sales, we saw a, again, huge jump year over year, about 53% more pending sales in Seattle than we saw last year. And again, remember, we saw a slight decrease in the amount of pending sales year over year looking back at last year, but then there was this quantum jump and it’s actually quite substantial. So this last year in Seattle, in May, we had 1,201 houses that went pending. And in 2019, we had 842, so that was before the pandemic. Last year we had 785, so for perspective, we had still about 40 plus percent more homes go pending than we did the year before. So I’ve mentioned, we’re starting to see normal amounts of houses coming on the market, but then we’re still seeing an abnormally large amount of houses that are selling. So houses are selling quick and they’re not staying on the market very long.
The median days on market here in Seattle last month, six days on market, and pretty similar as we look at the suburbs on the north and on the east side, we’re looking at six to five days. So a little higher in Seattle, if you want to call it that. And average days on market is fairly similar, so most houses are selling one to two weeks on the market, but the majority of the well priced homes, well-marketed homes are selling super fast, and most are getting multiple offers and seeing a pretty substantial jump on their asking price. Nearly everywhere is seeing the 10% bump in the asking price. So whatever the house is listed for, you can just add 10% pretty much without any question. If you look at Seattle, 7.7% above asking price on average, but everywhere else, Edmund, Shoreline, [Lynnwood 00:07:05], they’re all in that like 10 to 12% range. In the east side, Bellevue is at almost 13% above asking price on average. Redmond was almost 16% above asking price. So you’ve got a just substantially larger amount of money that’s needed to purchase and what you would initially think.
And it’s not out of the question to see 25, 30 plus percent above the asking price, and when we’re talking about averages. We’re taking the hotter houses, the larger numbers and mixing them in with a lower numbers, so yeah, there’s still houses that are selling right around the asking price, but a large majority of them are selling way, way, way above the asking price, and that’s just because there really aren’t that many houses available. And I’ve been talking about this for a few months. It’s not that we don’t have houses coming on the market. It’s just that we have so many people that want to buy a house that we haven’t been able to catch up to all the buyers. And some people have been saying recently, they think the market’s slowing down a little bit, and I did have a client get a house under contract last week where we were able to negotiate the price down. We got about $30,000 off the purchase price and we were able to negotiate an inspection contingency. Mind-blowing. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to do that, so that’s encouraging, I guess, on the buyer’s side, because I do work with buyers and sellers. But at the same time, I also had a listing that sold for almost 30% above asking pricing. It was more than 25%, somewhere in that 25 to 30% range. I don’t remember the number off the top of my head but it was mind-blowing. And so at the same time, you’re seeing a house maybe go a little bit below asking, you’re still having houses that are selling considerably over the asking price. And that’s kind of how we come up with these numbers, right? 12, 13% over, you average the two together.
So there are starting to be opportunities to purchase houses, maybe closer to the asking price, but the expectation, if you’re thinking about buying, is probably that you’re still going to be competing with people, especially over the houses that everybody really likes, the most desirable neighborhoods, the most desirable lots, the most desirable houses, the most updates, those kinds of things. Those are still appealing to the large majority of buyers. Now, if you’re looking at some of the houses that maybe have some quirks or there’s issues with the yard, things like that, you are seeing a little bit more room for negotiation, and at least that’s what I’ve been seeing here lately. So as a buyer, hopefully, that’s a glimmer of hope. For sellers, I think that’s a little bit of a bump.
Somebody that’s thinking about selling, that we may be coming to the end of this crazy frenzy that we’ve been seeing here over the last eight, nine months. But at the same time, we have no clue what the future holds so as much as I want to say, “I know what’s coming. I know what’s going to happen,” I realize that I have very limited understanding of what’s to come. So I think the rest of the summer if I’m going to make a prediction, I think we’re going to continue to see over the next few months a fairly hot housing market. But what typically happens if we look at history is that we see more and more and more and more houses continue to come on the market throughout the rest of the summer, which usually causes the competition to start to die down a little bit as buyers, start to get houses and move on with their lives.
So when you have more houses, you start to get buyers into houses and then you have a little less competition. And typically, by the time the end of the fall comes and the winter starts, in the Seattle area, we start to see not necessarily depressed prices, we just see a little less competition. Maybe you get a house near the asking price instead of way over the asking price. It’s not necessarily cheaper than what you would have paid in the summertime, sometimes it is a little bit, but it’s usually a little bit less frenzied and crazy. Now, I have no clue what this year holds. Last year was crazy and the unexpected happened. We had lower prices in the spring and higher prices in the summer and the fall and even in the winter, so when we look back at 2021 and we start doing these year over year comparisons as we get to September, October, November, I think we’re going to see a lot less dramatic jumps in the housing prices. But for now, in the next couple of months, we’re still going to continue to see these crazy numbers here that I’ve been talking about.
So buyers, I think there’s a little hope coming on the horizon, but I wouldn’t think that you’re going to all of a sudden be getting 10, 15% off the asking price. I don’t see any kind of a massive correction happening in the housing market. And sellers, I don’t think you need to panic and think, “Oh my gosh, I better sell my house tomorrow or no buyer’s going to want to buy it.” But I would say if you’re thinking about selling, that this is the time where you’d want to consider it. It is nice, the weather’s nice, the buyers are still there and plentiful. Come fall and winter, you might miss the crazy frenzy, so something to consider.
Thanks so much for watching my Seattle real estate market update. I hope that this content was valuable for you and you got some nuggets to take away. If you made it all the way to the end, I know that I brought you some value if you stuck it out, so please consider giving this video a thumbs up, and if you haven’t subscribed, please do so. Really quick, before you go, if you’re somebody who is thinking about buying or selling in the Greater Seattle area here in the near future and you don’t have somebody to help walk you through the home buying or selling process, please feel free to reach out to me through one of the contact methods here down below and I’d be happy to take great care of you.
