Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | August 2023

Hey all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my Snohomish County Real Estate market update for August, 2023.

What’s up, Snohomish County? I’m excited to just talk about what’s been going on in the housing market because as we, if you’ve been following this channel, have been looking at the housing market over the last year, year and a half has been quite a wild ride and maybe even longer if we look back to the early Covid days. And as 2022 really ended with a mess fizzle out, we’ve been seeing things building at least, um, continuing to recover from the, uh, drop-offs that we saw last year. As I look at Snohomish County, one of the things that I am, I would say encouraged by, given the scenario and the situation with higher interest rates and um, fear about the economy, is that we have low supply numbers. And that has really helped as we’ve, uh, considered, you know, okay, let’s look at 2023 as a whole so far.

And we’ve seen drop off in new listings, significantly fewer listings throughout the year than we normally would see, but last month we saw a, it looks like 33.9% drop off year over year. So in Snohomish County, that’s about 500 or so listings, which is significant. If we look at pending sales though only down 3.7%, so there was a lot bigger drop off in the new listings, um, and close sales down 23.8%, but again, still less than that 33.9% and that’s why we’re seeing supply being lower. We have 55.2% fewer houses right now available in Snohomish County than we did in July, 2022, heading into August, 2022. And that puts our supply number at 1.2 months versus 1.9 months of supply in 2022, which is a big reason why we’re seeing competition in the housing market in Snohomish County. And we’re seeing similar things in King County in a lot of ways they mirror each other, but as we’re seeing housing prices, the average sales price is only 0.7% below last year’s at 8 41 40 4,000.

And if we look at the median only down 2%, 7 49, 900, and from July in 2022, there’s a big drop off that continued all the way through the rest of the year. But as we’re looking at this year, yeah, I think we’ll see a little bit of a drop-off. I most years looking at the data and talking about the data, I’m seeing that the fall typically you see a little bit of a drop off in pricing from the peaks of the year. But at the same time, I think it will be a lot less dramatic, might be more the normal seasonal slowdowns than we have seen over, well at least uh, last year, right? Last year would’ve been unseasonably normal. And this year I think we’re gonna see some more than normal adjustments to the market. And I mean, even things are selling over asking price.

We’re seeing houses selling 1.4% above asking price in Snohomish County. And I mentioned in my Seattle real estate market update and I’ll, I’ll share this here ’cause it’s specifically Snohomish County relevant two listings, one listing in North Edmonds, one in South Edmonds, one in North Edmonds, super updated. The other one well kind of updated but not as updated. This house sells in like 24 hours, 150,000 over asking price this one. Well, it’s still for sale. And I think as we’re looking at the Snohomish County housing market, well I think this gives us a good picture. We’ve got some houses selling really quickly and I would say primarily those that are really nicely updated and there’s literally zero things that anybody would ever want to do to it. And then you’ve got some that are partially updated or maybe the updates are 10, 15 years old, not quite as appealing as the really updated one, but also priced higher than this house over here.

Maybe that hasn’t been updated in 60 or 70 years, but if you’re gonna do updates anyway, well maybe you buy this one, do those updates versus buying this one. Now some people would consider this house move-in ready and it’s great, but on the other hand, there’s more people looking for this modern update. So as we’re looking at Snohomish County in general, things are, yes, way better than they were. I think for me personally, the prognosis is way better at this point, looking at the rest of this year and into next year than it was. We’re looking at July, like what the heck is going to happen? Trying to predict what’s coming up, but to look at the future from here, it’s like, okay, well I have more confidence. And I think you’re seeing that in the stock market as well. I think consumer confidence is significantly higher right now, looking at what’s to come versus what they thought was coming or what did come at the end of 2022. So there’s a lot of data here, a lot of information, and I know for each of you, if you’re watching this, you might be approaching this a little bit differently. So if you are, um, wanting to talk a little bit more about how all of this applies to your situation, you’re thinking about maybe making a move or just have questions about buying or selling or investing in real estate in Snohomish County, I’d love to be a resource for you.