Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | January 2023

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and welcome to our very first Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update for 2023.

We’re gonna look back at the stats here as we wrapped up 2022 from December. This update will feel a little bit more like a recap as we look back over 2022. And we’ll just jump right into the stats here with the residential sales for December. And we’ll see here that the new listings were down quite a bit, 38.4%. pending sales were down only 17% though year over year. and close sales, 43.8% down, so quite a bit lower, but, but what we’ll see is that there were more pending sales than there were new listings. There were 445 pending sales versus the 303 new listings. And we’ll, we’ll see at the end how that’s affected the supply and homes. As we’re wrapping up the year, 37 days on market was the average in December for listings that had closed and sold in Snohomish County.

Think some of those are still holdouts from when homes were sitting a little bit longer. I’m starting to see a trend towards home selling a little quicker, so we’ll see if I’m crazy or if that’s just a small sample size or if that’s going to continue. I think a lot of that’s that the supply has just been shrinking, so there’s less options for buyers. and I’ve started to see just some of the, the home sell a little bit quicker. So just, just some thoughts. Median sales price, $684,995 in Snohomish County at the end of December. That was down slightly from just under 700,000 at the end of last month. And if we look back year over, year down, 2.6% median sales price last December in Sonomas County was just over $700,000. Average sales price is down 3% year over year. The average in Sonomas County this last month was $766,875.

If we look at the percentage of list price received, the average was 98.3%, but the average of the original list price, which is probably a better tell of the, the process, 94.8%. So a lot of sellers either had a price reduction or took a, you’ll see price cut. So most did take a price cut off their list price, but also saw price reductions before they got the price cut on the purchase price. Now inventory is way up. Supply, it’s 252.8% higher than it was last year. That’s a huge number, but we’re seeing supply shrinking. So the inventory numbers were super, super low at this same time last year, record lows, but 1.1 month of supply is low, and that’s what we’re heading into 2023 with. So we’re heading into the year with less supply, less new listings coming on, more activity starting to happen, but still less than normal, but more buyer activity than there are new listings.

So seller activity, which is again, normal during this time of year. So we’re seeing things that I would expect to see as we head into the new year. I think what we’re going to see is a little bit hotter start to the year, not, not like last year, but I think we’re just gonna see some buying and selling and things might pick up a little bit. And then I think we’ll see it slow down and taper off a little bit earlier than normal. I think we’ll have far less of a drastic change from where we’re at now to the end of the year than we did last year. Last year we had this huge increase in the beginning of the year. It was somewhat ridiculous. People paying 30, 40, 50% over asking price even more in some cases. And now houses are selling for considerably less than that.

So I would, I would guess that we won’t have as big a drop off this year <laugh> as we did last year, but I think we’re gonna start to see those year over year numbers be negative in when we’re starting here right now, Inno ish county with that negative 2.6% year over year. So we’re gonna start to see that as our trend for this next year. as we head through these updates. Now, let’s pay some special attention instead of doing highlights on certain areas in Snohomish County, which I typically do. I think I’m just gonna take this off the table. And what we’re gonna do is just focus in on the year to date numbers. And there’s this cool comparison. I don’t usually look at it except for at the end of the year, but it gives a good entire year snapshot of what happened.

So we’ll look at single family first and then we’ll look at the condos second here in Sonno ish county, but we’ll focus in on the single family to start. And if we look at this year, 2022, the previous year compared to 2021, we saw 5.1% fewer listings. So really not a big drop off, but we did see a little bit fewer listings, particularly towards the end of the year is when we started to see that drop off. Pending sales and close sales we’re both down 23 plus percent the amount of days for sale 18 versus 11. So a jump there in days to sell for the 2022 year. The home prices though across the whole year. So if we averaged all of the sales, the average sales price was $843,850. So that was 14.9% jump. If we take that median number, it was 759 and that was a 12.4% jump.

So we did see big gains if we look at the whole year, right, and average everything, but clearly that’s not how the world works. And we’ve seen home prices now drop off, so nobody would be paying this average price at this point, but it’s interesting to see when you put it all together, kind of how it shook out overall from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. Condos though similar in some ways, different in others. Little bit larger dropoff in new listings for condos, 14.9% dropoff, the dropoff in closed in pending sales was also a little higher at 28.6 and 26.2% respectively. Days on market didn’t change as much. They went from 11 to 14 days for the condos and the median sales price increase was 12.7%, very similar up to five 10. And the average sales price increase was up a little bit more, 17.7% at 5 88, 4 37. and across the board, condos were selling above asking price 4.1% for all of 2022. Now, interestingly, I mentioned people aren’t paying the same prices even though we’re, we can look at numbers this way, I don’t particularly like it, but it’s different. And if we look back now and, and take these numbers and then look in compared to December, what people were actually paying, people were paying less in December. Median sales price and average sales price versus these year to date averages. And the same thing with the single family. If we jump back to that, you’ll see that median sales price versus that median for the whole year is way lower right now. And same with the average sales price. So in any given year, it’s usually lower a little bit, but this year is a lot more dramatic.

Thanks so much for watching our first Snohomish County Real Estate market update for 2023. I wanna just take a moment and say thank you so much to those who have subscribed to the channel. I super value your attention and I appreciate your support. If you are new to the channel or haven’t subscribed yet, I encourage you and invite you to do so. I’d love to have you as part of the community and I’m happy to be a resource for you anytime you want to reach out.