Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | July 2023

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

Well, I’ve got some sad news for you, Snohomish County folks, and that’s that the McDonald’s are leaving. We’re gonna be moving outta Edmonds into our new house. We actually just moved into the new house last week in Shoreline. So now I’m across the border in King County, just barely. Uh, but we’re gonna keep doing these updates as I already do the King County updates, even though I didn’t live in King County, uh, because we do both areas, right? We service King and Snohomish County. But I thought it’d be fun to share that we bought a new house and that we’re moving on. If you’re looking for a house in Edmonds, hit me up. I had somebody reach out actually, um, about my house. We’re gonna be listing it on Thursday next week, so you’ll probably hear about that. But if you are looking to buy an Edmonds house is about 2,400 square feet, four bedrooms, mid-century style, one story with a basement, um, kind of on the South Edmonds, uh, shoreline border.

So, um, again, let me know if you’re interested in something like that. All right, let’s talk about the stats because that’s why we’re actually here. Not to talk about the McDonald’s moving and Snohomish County. Things are continuing to pick up. We’ve been following this over the past probably five, six months as prices have climbed. And we saw, um, home prices go just slightly down in Snohomish County month over month. Um, 7 65 was the median sales price last month and year over year, that’s down 3.2%. So last year, June was close to the top of the market and things started to fall off at that point. We’re not too far off from there, 3.2% down. The average sales price is actually up slightly, um, and down 1.8% from last year at 853,000. $92. Houses are selling faster. So 16 days on market versus 22 last month, that number keeps dropping and has been over the past few months.

Last year, homes were selling in 12 days. So a slight increase in the days on market. But what’s interesting is when we look at the supply numbers in Snohomish County from last year to this year, we’re seeing a massive drop off in the houses. So last year people were starting to put their houses on the market like, oh my gosh, I’m missing it. I gotta do it really fast. Before things change. Last year we had 1,611 houses. So just over 1600 houses list in June, this June, 986 listings. And a lot of those sold, like I said, fairly quickly. We had 813 pending sales. So 2.8% fewer pending sales in Snohomish County, but 38.8% fewer new listings, right? So way more activity than there were new listings. So inventory is continuing to compress and if we look at, if we look at the supply 801 houses available versus 1,606 houses available last year, 50% down from last year, we also have uh, 1.2 months of supply and that’s factoring in the buyer activity being reduced.

But 1.2 months of supply versus 1.6 months of supply. So 25% decrease year over year. And a lot of that’s keeping pressure on the inventory we’ve been talking about this year, how there hasn’t been enough housing, even though there are fewer listings and fewer sales that the numbers aren’t matching up. There’s a significantly larger drop-off in the new listings than there is in the buyer activity. And so we’ve been seeing competition again for the past few months, since Snohomish County prices have increased as a result, contingencies are being removed. Uh, but what we’re seeing here, I think in the past few weeks, as we’ve seen inventory start to pick up, it’s up a little bit month over month. So it was at one month of inventory last month. We’re at 1.2 months. It is normal to see more houses come on the market this time of year, so I would expect that to continue.

But how much? And I think that’s going to determine a lot. We have more housing supply, so there’s less of the multiple offer situations or less of the competition, but it’s still there. We also have interest rates up over 7%. Now, mortgage news daily has 7.14% as their number for today’s rates on average, which is considerably higher than the beginning of the year, and the highest numbers we’ve seen since November. So we have higher prices now than we did at the beginning of the year and higher interest rates, which just means the affordability is decreased, right? It’s harder to make that purchase now. So I think that affects the buying pool still a little bit. But at the same time, I would expect that by the end of the year, and I’ve said this earlier, I think we’re gonna see year-over-year prices up, and they’re not here right now, but I think towards the end of the year we’re gonna see home prices higher than they were at the end of 2022.

The opportunity for buyers has changed this year. You don’t have the opportunity to really negotiate closing costs or have your interest rate bought down like you did last year, and at the end of the year, you’re even getting a better price. And having that happen right now, you have a higher price and you also have a higher interest rate, but you’re getting houses for less than they were selling at their peak. So really, price really is the big benefit if you’re a buyer compared to last year in 2022. So there’s still opportunity, but you’re gonna pay for it. And I think like a lot of people that once we see interest rates come down, the only thing that’s gonna happen to prices is they’re gonna go up and they’re gonna shoot up, I would suspect because all of a sudden there’s a lot more affordability, people can take on larger mortgages and they can take on those payments.

And I think that right now the amount of interest and activity that we have, even with interest rates as high as they are to me, just signifies that there’s a lot of people that are still out there that want to buy. And there were even more that are on the sidelines still that I think are going to be coming back. So buyers, this is your chance to not have the competition that you’re going to have and in the past have had, I think. But I would say that we’re still gonna see home prices staying around this zone. I wouldn’t anticipate a big drop-off here in 2023 like we saw in 2022. In fact, I think things will end up higher at the end of the year than where they’re at right now. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Snohomish County Real Estate Market update. If you’re watching this still, I know you got some value, so please go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. And if you are thinking about making a move, buying or selling in Snohomish County and you’ve got some value out of this content, please feel free to reach out.