Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | May 2023

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

Welcome everybody to another Snohomish County Real Estate market update where we look at the data from April and we look forward to the rest of the year. And if you haven’t been following along, we do Seattle Real Estate Market watches every single week. Those are King and Snohomish County data smash together for a seven-day period. So we look at those every week. I do skip those when we do these updates, the monthly ones because I want people to be able to focus on these. But in these updates, we’re gonna look at the data and a lot of times we’ll look at different cities and parts of Snohomish County. Today we’re gonna look at the year-over-year numbers. So that will be towards the end. If you want to skip to that part, don’t skip this, right, don’t skip. But if you do and you want to see the year, uh, numbers so far, it’s more of a kind of mid-year, almost mid-year check-in for the data here.

So we’re gonna look at April’s data first, and as we look at April’s data, there’s some big, big deltas here. So 46.2% decrease in new listings in Snohomish County, 747. Last year we had 1,388 new listings in Snohomish County. Massive drop-off pending sales. We’re down about 30% up though month over month. Something I didn’t point out that I want to is that Snohomish County saw a decrease in new listings from March to April, which is really weird. Normally we see the listings continue to pick up, close sales are down, um, a little bit from the previous month, but down 44.3% from last year days on market is up considerably. But I think what’s important to point out is not that we have 25 days on market now, and last year there were seven. That’s important. But I think what’s more important is that the average days on market from last month was 36 and now it’s 25, and that median is actually closer to seven.

So we’re seeing houses sell quite a bit faster, but this average number from the Snohomish County stats is going to give a bigger picture, right? It’s gonna, it’s gonna show the stuff that’s sitting there on the market for longer and those are going to pull up the numbers. But a lot of the new stuff is selling a lot quicker. And I know I talk about this and have for the last couple months, but we’re continuing to see that average get closer to the median sales price in Snohomish County, $749,750 last month, 7 25. So up month over month. And that’s been the trend over the past few months. Down 9.8% from last year when we were at 831,000 for the median sales price. Average sales price last year was at nine 18 this year, 8 10, 800 10,000 1 96 to be exact, 11.8% down year over year.

So fairly similar there as far as the, the drop off there in median sales price and average sales price. And what’s interesting, so as we’ve been finishing out the spring and heading towards the summer in Snohomish County, we’ve seen that listing inventory has actually declined from the summer and the fall last year where it was up around two and it’s been dropping and dropping and dropping, we’re at 0.9 months of supply in Snohomish County, which is where we were last month, but last April we were at 0.8 months of supply. So you would think, or you would’ve thought, some people thought that we would see so much inventory on the market right now that it would just be a yard sale. You’d walk in and buy a house and you’d say, you know, Hey, this is what I want. Nope, I want, I’m gonna only pay you this, take it or leave it.

That is not the market we’re in right now, actually. We’re seeing houses sell above, asking prices in Hamish County. Not a lot, but 0.9% above asking price is still above asking price. All right? And we’re seeing houses sell quicker. We’re seeing houses, um, not sell for as much as last year by any means, about 10% less like we’ve talked about. But the fact that things are selling faster and selling over asking price is, well, I guess in surprising to some. Surprising to some. But I think interesting, uh, to track and the inventory I think is a big reason. We’ve seen homes, uh, for sale dropping, uh, slightly from last month, 21.7% down year over year. No, no, wait a sec. There are 21.7% fewer houses on the market right now in Stonebridge County than there were last year when the market was super hot. What?

That’s interesting. Now, King County was different. They’re still having more houses on the market than they did last year, but Snohomish County, this is significant. There were 801 homes on the market in Snohomish County at the end of April last year and 627 this year. Now the inventory numbers are higher, so why is that right? Why are the inventory numbers higher? I’m scratching my head for you, not for me. I know the answer. And that’s because there are way fewer buyers in the market right now. So even though there are fewer listings, the buyers and sellers are about equal. And that’s been the trend for 2023 so far. There’s been a drop-off in listing activity and buyer activity, but it’s been about the same. And so, and earlier in the year, there’s actually more buyer activity than there in the was seller activity. So we were seeing the numbers dropping and for inventory.

And what that does is it just puts pressure on the existing supply. So as we head towards the rest of the year, that’s what we’re gonna be looking at. We’re gonna be looking at what is going on with sellers, are they gonna be selling this year? And we’re also gonna be looking at the interest rates because that’s been a big, big factor for the buyers that are entering the market. And I think also for sellers, I’ve had so many conversations with people that are having a tough time conceptualizing, giving up. They’re really low-interest rate to buy something else, right? And unless you’re motivated to buy another house, well that’s tough to stomach. So I think interest rates will play a big part for the rest of 2023 as well. Okay, year to date, I promise we were gonna talk about that. So let’s do that right now.

Year to date in Snohomish County, we’ve seen a 38% drop off in new listings in pending sales. We had a 26.1% drop off so far in Snohomish County, closed sales, 29.8% down, nearing a third drop off in closings. The average days on market for the whole year so far, 37 versus 10 last year, 8.5% down on the price. Um, for median sales price, seven 15 so far this year average down 9.8% at 789,330. And for the whole year so far in Snohomish County, we’ve seen houses sell 99.8% of their value earlier in the year. It was a little bit lower. And again, we’ve been talking about that number is actually pulled up above asking price here recently. Now, are we in the same place as we were last year? Not at all. Are we getting there with the supply numbers? Yes. And that’s the first thing that happens before the market explodes, is the supply numbers tighten up.

Now could things change? Could we have worse news, bad news? Could we have people get afraid again? Yes, we definitely could have that. Could we have people start selling their houses all of a sudden? Yes, and we can see a flood of inventory and that would dramatically shift things, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think the rest of this year is going to be interesting. I think we’re gonna have a continued decline in new listings throughout the rest of the year. I think we’re gonna see that buyer activity will pick up, especially if interest rates drop and if that happens, they don’t even have to drop a lot, just a little bit. Makes things significantly more affordable with prices being down, if interest rates decline a little bit, people can get in and get a deal and also still have a better interest rate.

I think that’s gonna put a lot of pressure on what’s available. And the fact of the matter is people aren’t gonna be able to start selling quick enough. So if that happens, I think we’re gonna be in a pretty competitive housing market. We’re already in one that is starting to pick up in competition. So buyers, I do think there’s an opportunity right now for you there. I’ve been talking about this probably for a year. Um, but if you haven’t jumped on it yet and you’re in a place where you think you might wanna buy something here this year, I think you’re gonna get the best price right now. You might get a better interest rate later in the year, but I think you’ll get the best price right now. And if you’re somebody that’s a seller or you own a house and you’ve been thinking about getting out of it, I do think that things are gonna continue to get better for you here over the next few months.

But if you start that conversation sooner rather than later, you can start prepping your house getting ready. But if you do need to move or you want to move, I think, yeah, you’re not gonna get quite as much as somebody might have gotten last spring, but I think you’re gonna get a lot closer than you might expect. Thanks so much for watching my Snohomish County Real Estate market update here for May, 2023. If you got some value out of this video and you haven’t subscribed yet and you wanna see more stuff like this, please consider subscribing to the channel. And if you wanna chat more about your situation, if you’re thinking about buying or selling in s stylish county sometime here in 2023 or beyond, please don’t hesitate to reach out.