Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | March 2023

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

Things in Snohomish County are picking up and the numbers as we look at them aren’t going to show that in many ways because what we’re looking at is year over year declines and those are continuing to become more and more pronounced, as I mentioned, that they would last year. Home prices rose at a ridiculous rate up until the summer and then they’ve, well, they’ve been dropping for a while. So I hope this isn’t new news to you if you’ve been following along with the channel. But we are starting to see considerably larger negative numbers as it comes to median sales prices specifically. But let’s look at the data as a whole here as we do every month, and we’ll look at new listings first down, 32.6% year over year. Again, that’s a huge drop, but up month over month. So that’s good. Starting to see some more listings coming on the market in Snohomish County.

Pending sales are also starting to pick up month over month, but down 9%. But if you notice and pay attention to this, the delta between the new listings and pending sales decline is fairly substantial. We’ve had a lot fewer new listings than we’ve had fewer pending sales, so we still have a lot of that activity that we normally do. It’s down, but not nearly as much as the new listings are, which is keeping the supply low. It’s actually eating away at the houses that are available on the market. Closed sales up month over month, but down 13.1% year over year, more than 10% days on market 44, which is the exact same average as last month. But I’ll point out the median days has dropped down to 23. So we had a pretty big drop off there. Quite a bit fewer that we’re selling faster than the averages.

So I think what we’re going to see is these averages start to trickle down now as people are now pricing a little bit more in line with where the market is, it’s more transparent and I think that’s evidenced by the asking price or nearly asking price. percentage of list price, 99.3% of the list price in Snohomish County. Almost asking price on average. Now last year, 10% over asking price at the same time. So that’s a big drop off. But what’s encouraging is we’re starting to see homes sell for right around the asking price as well. In some cases, even above, believe it or not, median sales price. Snohomish County last month, $683,400, which is down 8.3% year over year, about the same as last month. It’s a couple thousand off average sales price down a little bit more from last month. and 12.4% down year over year at $737,264 I mentioned earlier.

The supply numbers have been dropping and that’s the case month over month not year over year. The numbers are up substantially, but month over, month down and we’re down to 0.7 months of supply in Snohomish County, which really means two and a half weeks or so of houses that are available on the market, which is a really low inventory environment. If interest rates were different and their buyer activity picked up at this point right now, we’d be seeing a very similar spring to what we saw last year as far as competition over the listings, especially with prices being down. So I think interest rates are a big factor right now as far as keeping the market where it’s at. But again, the activity level is picking up as we’re seeing more pending sales than new listings here in Snohomish County. And a lot of that I think is people jumping into the market and keeping their New Year’s resolutions, deciding to buy regardless of rates, right, with rate indifference, so to speak, and focusing more on the decline in prices.

And speaking of prices, I wanna play a little game this month with Snohomish County instead of maybe highlighting specific cities. I want to play a game called, I’m gonna call it big or small, okay, big are the largest drops in median sales price in the entire county, and then small are the smallest drops or even gains, if you could believe that. So let’s look at some of the biggest drop-offs. First, we’ll look at Mount Lake Terrace, 34.2% down year over year. That’s massive. Muckle to down 28.9%. Mill Creek down 25.7%. Monroe down 31%, Briar down 32.2%. And I only mentioned the places with more than 25%. Dropoffs, Bothel, Linwood were very close. Naish almost qualified for this list. What’s crazy though is Mount Lake Terrace, even with the massive drop-off last month, saw houses sell above asking price on average 0.7% above asking price. And a few other places in Snohomish County did as well.

Places like Granite Falls, Arlington Stanwood saw just above asking price on average. So things are definitely picking up and I’ve been talking about this. We’ll start to see this. I think changing as people see these larger drop-offs and prices, I think it becomes more real. Well, prices really are down that much. It’s not just some real estate agents saying that smallest drop-offs by comparison from year over year, Edmunds is up 1.5% year over year. Again, based on February, 2022 to 2023. Everett is down 7.1%. Lake Stevens down only 1%. Gold Bar up 4.3%. Darrington, my favorite to read the stats for is up 66.7% because there just aren’t that many houses. So it just depends on which ones sell. And then Marysville down 6.8%. All of these places have been better or had smaller declines than the county as a whole. Now I mentioned we’re starting to see things picking up.

There are certainly places in Snohomish County where there are larger opportunities, if you want to call it that. A lot of the places that saw the biggest gains year over year, the past couple years are also the places that saw the biggest drop-offs. But now there are opportunities to get into those places, not maybe where the prices were a few years back, but maybe better than where they were last year. So I hope this was valuable for you. If you enjoy this update, please consider subscribing to the channel for more content like this. And of course, if you got a lot of value out of it, please also give it a thumbs up.