Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | October 2023
Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Snohomish County Real Estate Market update for October, 2023.
What’s up, Snohomish County? We’re going to, in this video, recap the data from last month directly from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. We’re going to primarily look at the residential data here in Snohomish County, but we’ll also do a bit of a recap through quarter three. Let’s jump into the data now and we’ll see, looking at the new listings that we had a drop off 19% in new listings year over year and year over year is how I typically like to consume real estate data because it takes into account the seasonality of real estate. But if we want to look month over month, we saw a decline as well in new listings, and I would say that’s odd a little bit.
Normally we would see an uptick in listings in September, but this year we’re actually seeing a decline. King County did see an uptick, but Snohomish County, well, you’re trying to be interesting and unique. Pending sales, we saw a drop off month over month and also year over year, 9.3%, close sales also down 25.9% through 2023. We’re seeing a very similar pattern that’s continuing where we see a drop off in sellers listing and buyers buying. And those two drop-offs are remaining relatively consistent, which is why we’re seeing a slight decline in housing inventory versus any kind of big, big growth, which is what some people thought would happen. So if we look at our months of supply in Snohomish County, 1.5 months versus 1.8 months last year, a decline of 16.7%. And a lot of that, if you look at the other data point here, the inventory of homes for sale, we’ve seen a 42.1% drop off.
If you look back at last year’s inventory of homes for sale versus this year’s, and it’s a slight increase from last month, but we haven’t seen a lot of houses sitting on the market and a lot of inventory building up. In fact, houses are still selling about 22 days on market, which is historically very fast, just over three weeks on the market. Last year, they were taking 27 days to sell. So we’ve seen a decline in the amount of days on market, and what this has done is it’s kept prices up. Prices in Snohomish County are up year over year. If we look at the median sales price, 745,000 this year versus 725,000 at the same time last year. Now, of course, the prices are not where they were in the spring of 2022, but if we look year over year, we’ve seen that prices have stabilized quite a bit.
In Snohomish County, the average sales price is also up 2.4% at 817,595, and houses are typically selling for asking price. Last year, people were getting a deal. In some sense, houses were selling below asking price 98.6% of the asking price. But this year that’s not the case. And in some cases we’ve seen houses selling considerably over asking price in Snohomish County. And what I think all this means is that things have started to stabilize. Whereas last year we were in this free fall and we’re trying to figure out where it’s going to end up. We’ve had another year of data, another year of higher interest rates. And yes, interest rates have climbed in 2023, about three quarters of a percent since the same time last year, at least according to mortgage news dailies survey. But overall with the increase in interest rate, even with the decline in listings and the decline in buyer activity, things have remained relatively similar, if not even I would say slightly improved or I would look at the market a little bit more optimistically now than I did even at the same time last year.
Now, let’s look at overall, let’s look at the Q three update. Where are we at this point? So if we look through 2023, so far we’ve seen 35.7% fewer listings. We talked about that. We’ve seen 22.8% fewer pending sales. We’ve seen 27.1% fewer closings. Now again, we talked about how the buyer and the seller activity has been declining and fairly similarly, so that’s why we’re seeing that the prices have remained relatively stable and also why the supply numbers are not ballooning, but actually declining a little bit. Days on market, 26 days on market versus 14 last year. Now last year is taking into account all of the really low days on market from the winter and springing of 2022 before things started to slow down. If we look at the recent data, we’re seeing that things are selling faster now, but early in 2023 homes, were taking two months to sell. So that’s why we’re seeing the 26 days on market average. Now, sales prices, similar thing, factoring in the highs, all time highs in Snohomish County last year were down 4.6% on the median sales price, and this year 5.2% on the average price and homes last year were selling on average 4.9% above asking price for the whole year through September. And this year 0.5% above asking price. So even with the slowdown, homes have still been selling relatively quickly at this point and also over asking price.
Now, Snohomish County, I think we’re already starting to see what we’ll see for the rest of the year, a decline in the listing inventory. I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of people trying to sell their houses this winter and during the holidays, and that’s normal. Typically we see quite a big drop off. It may be not much more substantial just because usually the people selling during the holidays really need to sell and well, that’s the people that are selling right now anyway. So maybe things will be more similar than they have been for the whole year, but I would suspect that things will slow down a little bit. If you’re thinking about selling during the holidays, you’ll certainly be one of the few, and that would give you an advantage, I guess, with the buyers that are out there. And for the people that are thinking about buying for next year, I would just tell you that you might benefit from starting sooner and getting yourself in the rhythm of looking at houses and maybe getting your pre-approval and being ready to jump because there will be more houses coming on the market.
It always does at the beginning of 2024, and I’ve just seen this historically, for those that are ready and get started in the wintertime, that they’re more successful quicker with the home purchases as inventory does dwindle and the winter, and then a lot more people start looking. So if you get started earlier, it gives you a little bit of advantage heading into the new year. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update. If you made it to the end here and got some value, please show some love with a thumbs up. And if you want to see more videos like this, please subscribe to the channel.
