Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | September 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 September, 2023.

Alright, well, I’m excited to be back. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been on the camera. Took a little vacation with the family, actually about 10 days off, which was absolutely amazing. I’m excited to talk a little bit about what’s going on here in the Snohomish County Housing market as we jump back into the new month and really the final push for the rest of 2023. And as I’m looking at the data, I figured I would start off with just a little story time here, which is a little different for these updates as I normally just focus on data, but I had four different clients that bought or sold with us last month in Snohomish County. So I think this might be a little bit of helpful insight to what’s going on in the market. As far as the data goes, the data’s very similar to what we’ve been seeing most of the year, but the stories I think help paint a good picture and they’re kind of all over the place.

So we had a townhouse slash condo purchase client in North Edmonds, almost Lynnwood that one. The house was on the market for about 30 days and the buyer got the house below asking price. We had a condo in downtown Edmonds that had been on the market for, I would say way too long, but it was a while, right? It was like three and a half, four months. This particular client didn’t want to adjust the price. We sat on that price for the entire listing period. Ended up selling a little bit below asking not much, but we rode out the ups and the downs, so to speak of this year already. She sold it for more than she bought it for back in November, which is great situation. We don’t, I guess, have time to get into today. The other one up north picnic point area in Edmonds seller as well.

This one sold in 24 hours on the market, maybe 28, and was about 15% over asking price. This one. Beautifully updated larger house, really happy for those clients. And then we had another listing in Lynnwood. It was an outdated rambler, three bedrooms, one bath. This one sold fairly quickly as well. It probably would’ve sold quicker if it didn’t have an offer review date. And in fact it did sell before its offer review date. Still multiple offers on that one. Sold a little more than 8% over asking price. So a couple listings that sold above, asking price fairly quickly. One that sat for a little while, that was the condo. And then the townhouse was the one where we had the price reduction as the buyer. So again, small sample size out of all the sales in Snohomish County, when we look at Snohomish County, there were 773 closed sales, right?

So we had four of them, which seems like a lot in a year like this when we’re having four in a month. That’s about our average, I would say for clients helped. But looking at the data, it’s just a small sample size. But seeing that condos, and as we look at this here, condos 14 days on market. So actually if we look at data, condos tend to sell faster right now than the single family houses at 20 days on market. If we look at the closed sales, 129 were condos. And then there were 773 single family sales. The median sales price for single family homes in Snohomish County, 725,000, that was the median sales price, 1% down year over year, a little bit more than that. It was seven 50 last month for single family. So again, a little bit bigger drop off. It’s normal to see prices dropping off.

That’s why we always do the year over year comparisons here. The average sales price was $800,919, which was also 1% drop off from last year. The condos in contrast, 4 75 was the median sales price last month in Sonno County. And then 5 29 9 43 was the average sales price. So you’ll see, if you look at the numbers here, you’re looking at 250 ish thousand dollars less for a condo versus single family house in Snohomish County. As far as the percentage of the list price, single family houses in Snohomish County, we’re selling for 0.7% over asking price. The median, if you look at it, it’s not on this report, but the median was exactly the asking price. So you’re seeing some stuff selling above, some stuff selling below. And that’s the same case for the condos. Condos were 0.8% above asking price. Again, same for the median as far as supply goes.

One month of supply for condos in Snohomish County and 1.4 months of supply for the single family houses, which I would argue is a large reason that we’re seeing the condos selling quicker than we are the single family and maybe a little bit more pressure on the pricing, but it’s really been about the same for the condo market in Snohomish County as the single family market. And as we’re looking at the overall market, interest rates have trended higher. Earlier in the year, interest rates had trended down and now we’ve seen interest rates trend back up towards the 20 year highs we were seeing last fall in 22. And I think that we’re still a little bit out from seeing these rates coming down. They started to pull back a little bit this last week, but now they’ve kind of jumped again. And I think a lot of people that I’m following are talking about once we see the Fed stop raising rates and stop talking about maybe doing it, once we see or feel like that we have inflation under control, we’re going to start to see these rates coming down for mortgages.

But for now, we’re still in a little bit higher rate environment and considerably higher than we were at the same time last year, which again, is just putting a lot of pressure on the monthly budget of potential home buyers. So are houses in Snohomish County still moving? Yes. Houses are selling relatively quickly. If we look at the numbers, I mean 20 days on market, it’s not really that long. Historically speaking, houses selling at asking price, well, I mean that’s a good thing if you’re a seller, there’s not a lot of deals out there, but there are some. My house in Snohomish County is still on the market, by the way. Every house is different. If you’re a seller, you can certainly sell your house right now. Your house is going to sell for about what it would’ve sold for last year in August. So at this point, we’re not at the peak prices of this year.

I would say we’re probably on the downside of the prices, which every single year we see prices peak out in the spring, summer, fade off into the fall and winter. And I think we’re going to be on a similar trend here. I still think, I mean, as we’re looking at it, earlier in the year, we were seeing large negative year over year numbers and we’re kind of right back to where we were. So not a lot has changed in the pricing over the last year. Now there was a drop off from the spring, but not a lot’s changed from the year over year numbers that we’re looking at now. And that’s with interest rates significantly higher, less listing activity, less buyer activity that’s remained the same, but there are still houses selling buyers buying, let’s be real. There are always houses that get a little bit more activity than others.

And there are certain things about a house that you can’t change. And those are factors, again, outside of people’s control, but that cause houses to take a little bit longer to sell too. So overall, Snohomish County housing market is looking a lot better than it was at the same time last year. Price maybe hasn’t changed much, but there are a lot better metrics. You don’t have houses selling below asking price. You have higher interest rates, but you still have stuff moving. And I think the overall sentiment is better. There’s a little less fear and uncertainty than there was, but the same thing remains and the same question lingers at the back of people’s mind. And I think that is, well, I have this really low interest rate and what’s it going to take for me to trade this low interest rate in for a high interest rate?

And a lot of people are in that tension where they’re not willing to make that jump. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Snohomish County Real Estate market update. If we got to this point, if you’re watching this video all the way to the end, I know you got some value out of it, so please consider giving it a thumbs up or even subscribing to the channel if you want to follow along on a regular basis. And if you want to talk a little bit more about buying or selling in Snohomish County, maybe you find yourself in a position where you’re thinking about making a move. I’d love to be a resource for you.