Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | November 2023

Hey, it’s Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Snohomish County Real Estate Market update for November, 2023.

What’s up, Snohomish County? We are about to jump into the data from last month in October, 2023. This is the Northwest multiple Listing Service data fresh off the press. Now, as we’re looking at listings, I predicted it’s not a hard prediction, but I predicted that we would see things starting to slow down this month and it’s going to continue for the rest of the year. So well without letting us down. We saw fewer listings in Snohomish County last month than we did the previous month, and we also saw a decline, not quite as substantial as we were seeing earlier in the year, but still 10.3% down year over year. So we saw the drop-off that we normally see, but we also saw an even greater drop-off than we did in the new listings from last year, and we shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been seeing this all year. We’ve been seeing less homes available.

We’ve also been seeing less buyer activity, so fewer closed sales, 15.6% down year over year. So again, fewer close sales, fewer new listings, nothing really out of what we’ve seen for 2023, we did see more pending sales, so we had a 2.3% uptick in the pending sales last month than we did year over year. It was down month over month. Again, normal. But we did see an uptick in the pending sales. So interesting data point for us.

I think we’re still seeing buyers out there, right? Buyers are still looking to make purchases. Sellers are not selling as frequently. There aren’t as many buyers. Things have stabilized. They really have, and we’re seeing that with all of these numbers. When we look at days on market, days on market, 24 days on market, 22 last month. So slight uptick, but again, they’ve remained relatively the same. They’re actually down year over year from 31 days on market. The median sales price, 717,470, which is down from 745 last month, again normal, but we also saw a very minor drop off from last year, 1.7% down. So things have stayed about the same. If we look at the average sales price of 787,261, it’s down 0.7% from last year. So prices staying about the same percentage of list price received a hundred percent houses are selling for asking price on average in Snohomish County. Again, that’s a sign that there’s not a lot of negotiation room, but when we look at things, we’re seeing that houses are selling for about the asking price, and they’re selling for about the same thing as last year, and they’re selling relatively quickly about two to three weeks on the market.

Now, inventory of homes for sale, that’s again something we expect to see a drop-off in month over month. And we did very small in Snohomish County, but if we look back at last year, 37.6% drop off. So last year there were 1,462 houses that were available in Snohomish County at the end of October and this year, 912, big drop off. Now the months of supply, that’s what we’re looking at, the amount of houses versus the amount of buyers activity, 1.8 months of supply versus 1.4 months this year. So we saw a drop off there. Again, not unexpected, slight drop off from last month. And as we’re looking at heading into 2024, I think we’re going to see more of these same trends in Snohomish County. We’re going to see fewer houses coming on the market and not as dramatically fewer, but we’re still going to see fewer houses listing than would’ve listed last year.

And we’re also going to see a little bit less buyer activity. But my encouragement to buyers, somebody that’s thinking about buying in 2024, this isn’t for everybody, but if this is you, I would be preparing, I would be getting ready. I would be having conversations around what does it look like to get my financing in order? What does this home buying process look like? How can I get myself prepared for maybe making a purchase when the market’s down? If it is seasonally down right now, and it will continue to be for the rest of the year, and it’s going to pick up heading into 2024. It always does, and it’s going to this next year. It did even last year coming out of, well, some of the more dramatic price drops in the whole entire country. Now things have stabilized.

We’ve been talking about that. Interest rates they dropped last week, but how much more are they going to drop? How quickly is that going to happen? That’s anybody’s guess, but when interest rates do start dropping, that’s when things are going to pick up really fast. And I personally, if I was in a buyer’s shoes, wouldn’t want to miss out on that opportunity because things will jump quickly. They did last year. Rates dropped down into the mid fives, upper fives, low sixes for a little bit, and things picked up a lot, and then they’ve gone up towards 8%, above 8%. In some cases, things have slowed down and they’re starting to come down a little bit. So I can only expect that we’ll see the normal amount of activity pickup in the new year, but also if rates are helping out, we’re going to see even more of a push to make a purchase.

Sellers, the same thing goes for you. This is your opportunity to prepare for putting your house on the market. Maybe there’s some repairs that need to be done, maybe you have some deferred maintenance to do, maybe you want to make some upgrades. This is when I would start to make those preparations so that I was ready to put my house on the market. Usually late winter, early spring is the best time of the year. Again, there are pros and cons to listing at any point of the year, but if I was a seller, I would actually air towards earlier versus later, especially when the market’s as volatile as it is right now.

Thanks so much for watching this month to Snohomish County Real Estate Market update. If you made it to the end, I know that you got some value out of it, so I’ve got a couple favors to ask. Number one, if you got some value out of this video, please consider sharing it with somebody who might also be able to benefit from it. Number two, if you want to talk about buying or selling real estate here in Snohomish County, please reach out. And number three, if you want to see more videos like this on a regular basis, please subscribe to the channel.