Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | December 2020

Hey Y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and today we’re gonna talk about Snohomish County’s real estate market and go over the stats from November, 2020. You may have noticed that I’ve added on a King County and Snohomish County real estate market here recently, and as an addition to the Seattle real estate market updates that I’ve been doing for, I don’t even know now, like three, four years at this point, if you want to go back and reference some of those updates, feel free, you can find those on my YouTube channel as well. but we’re gonna continue talking about Snohomish County on a regular basis going forward. Now, let’s look at the November, 2020 stats, and I’m gonna go through these relatively quickly, add a little bit of context as we talk through it, and then provide a little bit of application for you at the end.

Let’s get started. As we look at new listings in Snohomish County, we saw 1.8% increase. So we didn’t see a dramatic increase in new listings like we saw in King County or in Seattle. we also though saw an increase in pending sales, 11.2% and a 22.4% increase in closed sales. So we saw a good bump in buyer activity in not as substantial of a bump in the listing. So the result is fewer days on market. So 15 days on market in November, 2020 versus 31 days on market in November, 2019, which was a 51.6% decrease in time on market, pretty substantial. We also saw a 15.5% increase in the median sales price. Last year we were at 4 91 and this year in Snohomish County 5 67 for the median sales price. And the average sales price was also up about the same 15.8%. And we were looking at last year, 5 27, almost 5 28.

And this year we’re looking at just over 600, $11,000 on average. So prices in Snohomish County have increased even more so than Seattle itself and King County. Now we can speculate about why that is. Maybe people moving out of King County into Snohomish County. part of that might have been politics, other part of it might have been the fact that people can work from home now. And the higher paying jobs do tend to be in Bellevue and Seattle with people commuting in some places in Snohomish County, specifically, some of the more affordable places with bigger yards and things like that. Just too long of a commute into Seattle. For most people, most people don’t wanna drive an hour to an hour and a half to even two hours to get to work. But now that we’ve seen more people working from home and maybe even more permanently working from home, I think people are considering Snohomish County

A little, little bit more than they were prior. On average, the single family houses were receiving offers above asking price 2.5% above asking price. And last year you were actually able to get a discount in Snohomish County, similar to King County. In November, 2019, homes were selling at 99.6% of the asking price. So just barely below the asking price. But that’s a 2.9% increase for this time of year, which is odd. Normally this time of year is when you get a little bit of a discount on homes. It’s the end of the year people just want to be done. Maybe they’ve had their house on the market for a little bit, but right now homes are selling so quickly and there are so little inventory for the buyers that there really isn’t much negotiating the asking price. Most of the time the asking price is the starting point.

If you’re an economics person at all, you know, supply and demand is a huge mechanic in the economics world. Now it’s simplistic and there are a lot of other factors specifically in real estate, but as we’re looking at inventory or amount of homes, supply of homes, we saw more than a 50% decrease. So 64.9% decrease in homes for sale in Snohomish County at the end of the month. Last November, we had 1,170 homes on the market at the end of November this year, 411 homes on the market. And that gives us 0.4 months of inventory or supply in Snohomish County, which is super, super, super low. What that means is if no new homes come on the market in Snohomish County over the next half a month, which we’re probably gonna see an continued decrease in inventory, the buyer activity keeps up. We’re gonna see inventory numbers like 0.1, 0.2 maybe in December.

So it’ll be interesting to see the stats. I could be wrong, but we’re substantially lower inventory numbers than we’re used to seeing this time of year. As we look at the condo numbers in Snohomish County, we’re gonna see some similar numbers at scale, a few that are different, specifically new listings. We saw about 24.6% new listings, so we did see an uptick in condo listings. Part of me thinks that it’s maybe buyers that have a condo that want to buy a house, right? I think pending sales are up as well, 42.6%. So activity has picked up for the condos as well as for the residential market. And then you have closed sales actually down a little bit year over year. So 3.5% down on condos, but days on markets down 46.9% and price is up. So that median sales price up 5.3% for Snohomish County Condos and up 2.4% for the average of the Snohomish County Condos.

So not nearly as great of a return on investment. If you wanna look at the numbers between residential and condos, and buyers always ask me, is it better to buy a condo if I can afford it or save up for a house? And it really depends on your situation and what your needs are and ultimately what your goals are and what you’re looking to do. But I think this is just a good example of the fact that condos, at least in Snohomish County last month, did not appreciate nearly the same as the single family houses did. And I think that’s a trend that I, we we see consistently that traditionally speaking, buying a condo, you’re gonna see less of a return on investment than you are in a single family house. And I think even I’ll add this in a bad market, if the market corrects or is in a bad place, again, you’re gonna see a larger drop as well in values on those condos, at least we did last time than on the single family properties.

With all that said, I, I don’t mean to scare you if you’re somebody thinking about a condo in Snohomish County or otherwise, but it’s just, it’s just a fact. of that has been proven statistically over time, the inventory of homes has substantially decreased. From last year to this year. We’ve seen a 56.1% decrease in condo inventory and for the amount of homes for sale condos, we’ve seen a substantial decrease as well looking at 0.5 months of supply, which is 58.3% down year over year. So condos are still selling quickly, condos are still selling above asking price, and the condos are still seeing a low inventory situation, which only continues to fuel the increase in prices. So condos are increasing in value, but not as quickly as their single family counterpart. As we wrap up this update, I wanna give a little extra context.

I think heading into the new year, we’re probably going to see these numbers at least supply and inventory numbers continue to dwindle. I think we’ll continue to see strong home values. I don’t see any reason why, especially with the low interest rates that we have and the demand for Snohomish County Real Estate. I coupled with just the fact that there aren’t that many houses coming on the market, I think we’re gonna continue to see prices climbing in Snohomish County into the new year. Thanks so much for tuning into my second ever Snohomish County Real Estate market update. First of all, if you made it all the way to the end of this video, I know you got some value out of it, so please consider subscribing to my channel. And if you want to see other videos like this one, maybe look into the King County real estate market. If you’re not quite sure where you wanna land or you want to see more general thoughts on the Seattle real estate market in the area, I’ve been doing those videos for a lot longer. Please go head over to the channel and check ’em out.