Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | March 2022

Hey, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Snohomish County Real Estate Market update for March, 2022. As we dive into this update, we’re going to look at stats from last month, February, 2022. We’re going to look at some specific areas of Snohomish County, and we are going to talk a little bit about some applications for buyers and sellers in Snohomish County coming up. Starting with, in my opinion, some of the most exciting stats, and I guess this is a matter of perspective, but for sellers or homeowners, this is exciting news to you. We have officially hit the highest price ever, median sales price and average sales price in Snohomish County this month. The median sales price in Snohomish County, $749,950 countywide, 20.6% jump year over year. Lots and lots of growth in Snohomish County, even more than King County considerably.

And the average sales price in Snohomish County last month, $846,677, 24.3% jump year over year. Substantial. Again, quite a bit more than King County on the south end. And really the story here is a lot of people have been moving out of the city and focusing on the suburbs. And Snohomish County being a little bit politically different than its neighbor King County, at least in portions, is a factor. I think prices also have been considerably lower in Snohomish County than King County, although that gap is very quickly shrinking, especially on the median sales price average. There’s a lot less diversity in home prices in Snohomish County and on average than there are in King County. There are places in King County where you’re buying $2 million houses In places where you’re buying $500,000 houses in Snohomish County, there’s a lot more similarity in the home values.

There aren’t as many extreme outliers and there aren’t as many outliers on the lower end. A few more stats that you might find interesting here in Snohomish County, we had 21% more new listings, 21.1%, and that’s significant because we’ve been needing more houses on the market. The sad part of this story is we still have no houses for people to buy. As we wrapped up the month, we had 25.2% less inventory, our homes for sale. So we saw a 21% jump in new listings, but we also saw 25% decrease in the amount of homes available. So that’s a huge delta, and that still puts us in a place where we have 0.2 months of supply. We’ve been talking about this really, really low amount of homes for all the buyers, and that’s continuing to persist in Snohomish County. And really there’s no apparent end in sight. Unfortunately, that’s putting

A lot of pressure on prices, and that’s why we’re continuing to see prices climb. And last month in Snohomish County, we saw a new record for the amount over asking price. We jumped above 10%, 10.2% above asking price, which a few years ago would’ve been the record across all of the Seattle Bellevue Metro area. But we’re seeing the prices in Snohomish County continuing to push some of those limits. And last month even 4% jump from then. And year over year, 4.8% jump in the amount over asking price. So last year, at the same time, we’re still in a competitive market in the winter, but we’re now seeing the highest prices we’ve ever seen, the highest percentages over asking price we’ve ever seen in Snohomish County. And we still have three, four months of what is historically the prime time to sell a house in the peak prices for the year.

So I think if you are a buyer, and I’m jumping ahead here, typically I would have these conversations towards the end. But if you’re a buyer, you’re really in a competitive market. What that means is as a buyer, you are really trying to make your offer as favorable to the seller as possible, or essentially enticing them to take your offer, which means price, contingencies terms are all more of what the seller would want versus what you would want in a historical situation. And my advice for you is get started early. And this is a theme that I’ve repeated in these videos and will continue to repeat. If you want to be a successful buyer in Snohomish County, you need to get started early and you need to be an aggressive buyer. And I’ve been telling people recently, and this is more coaching for the hotter markets in the times where it’s a lot more difficult to buy a house, but you really need to be a buyer that has motivation.

So you need to buy a house. there’s a time pressure as well that goes along with that. You also need to have financial means. You need to have more financial means than other people right now to be successful. And you also need to be more aggressive than people. If you have those three things, you are going to be most likely successful faster than some of the other buyers when there’s competition, when there are 10, 15, 20 offers, there are things that you can do to set yourself apart, but there are also other people that can do those same things. So for you as a buyer to be successful, motivation means, and also the aggressive offers. Sellers, this is probably the part that’s exciting to you as we talk about the areas of Snohomish County where houses are selling of way above asking price prices are continuing to push new record heights.

And there are specifically a few areas where if you’re a homeowner and you’re thinking about selling your house, you are in luck. And right now as we’re looking at the counties, the Hummish County as a whole, home prices in Mill Creek have jumped up 6.9% year over year. And home prices in Snohomish are up 50.8% year over year. And those are a few of the big eye popping numbers. Mount Lake Terrace as well, 42% above asking price. These areas in specific are seeing a lot of growth in a lot of people looking there, partly because they’re more affordable. But Mill Creek is one of the few places where prices are above a million. And if we look at the median sales prices last month, four places or cities in Snohomish County eclipsed the million dollar mark. And I just in my King County update shared how there were multiple places eclipsing 2 million.

So there is a big gap in affordability, especially in some of these places. But Mill Creek had a median sales price of 1.101 million, almost 1.102. In Bothel, we saw 1.225 just over that in Bothel. And in Snohomish we saw just over 1000001.002 million. So just eclipsing that million dollar mark. Mill Creek and Brier, both were over 20% above asking price on average Breyer’s sample size, fairly small. Not a lot of houses selling in Briar on a regular basis, but if you’re looking to buy there or sell there, it’s competitive. Mill Creek had 22.5% over asking price. but if we look at Linwood and Bothel, these are just areas growing up here where it wasn’t as competitive or as desirable. They were the places where you could build and still put new houses. And I think now we’re starting to see a lot of people focusing in on these areas, partially because of the convenience to 4 0 5 and I five with Bellevue and Seattle respectively as the commutes very centrally located, but they’re also newer houses.

So some of the areas were developed at earlier points, specifically places like Edmonds and Kirkland, a lot less newer development, but Bothel and Linwood have a lot more of those newer type houses, and I think there’s a big draw towards those for some people. So we’re seeing 19.4% over asking price for homes in Linwood and in Bothel, we’re seeing 19.2% above asking price. Thanks so much for watching my Snohomish County Real Estate market update for March, 2022. If you have questions about the real estate market or want to talk more about your individual situation, please feel free to reach out. And if you have comments or thoughts about the market in Snohomish County, I’d love to see comments down below.