Seattle Real Estate Market Update | July 2023

Hey all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Update for July, 2023.

What’s up everybody? I bought a house this month, which is really exciting and I have to say it’s been a lot and I’ve gone through, I don’t know, I dunno how many different emotions that I’ve gone through this past month, but we’ve had to pack up the house, get the other house ready to sell, which is gonna be going on the market here next week, and also moving into a new house with four little kids. So lots of different emotions going on, but I have to say it’s been a really healthy dose of empathy on my end for what clients go through, what buyers go through, what sellers go through. We’ve even made a few tweaks to some of our processes here lately. So, uh, a little life update, but thought that’s kind of fun as you know, the markets, uh, heating up, but also at the same time I’m starting to see some signs of things slowing down all at the same time.

And a couple things I think that are shifting right now. We’ve seen, as I mentioned earlier in the spring, we were seeing such a low amount of supply and one of the things that’s changing is we’re starting to see the supply numbers increase. So we’re starting to see more inventory, which puts less pressure on each house. Instead of having maybe one house and three buyers, now you have two houses in three buyers, or you have three houses in three buyers. So what we’re starting to see, I think is an increase in supply. It’s putting less pressure on the houses, and we’re also seeing interest rates trending higher. Again, the mortgage news daily report here, their survey from today is showing mortgage rates at their highest rate since November. Up well above seven, looks like 7.14% here as of today. And my rate is not amazing.

I think I locked an I guess 6.99%. So, um, a little bit better maybe than the averages here today. That was from a few weeks ago. But rates have trended, higher supply is increasing and I think that’s pausing some of the frenzy we were seeing this spring. And I, I told you in those videos that a lot of it was supply driven. There wasn’t as much activity happening as far as buyer activity, but the amount of listing activity was also down and nothing’s changed on that front, but this is the time of year where we normally see more supply coming to the market and we’re seeing that, um, not in the same levels though. So let’s, let’s shift and look at some of the numbers because King County set a new record priced for June 1% more than last year. But when we look at Seattle and Bellevue’s numbers, were down a little bit year over year.

So Seattle was nine 20 median sales price last month, uh, down 4.7% year over year, but up from last month at 8 85. So we’ve seen an increase. Um, Bellevue was similar. Bellevue saw a little jump month over month, but year over, year down, 6.4% at 1 million, 750,000. Let’s look at listings because I mentioned we’re starting to see more supply and year over year listing supplies down 29.5% and in Seattle and in Bellevue down 26.3%. So we’re continuing with that trend of lower supply. But we did see an increase in houses on the market in Seattle and Bellevue. So we saw more houses list in June than we did in May pending sales. If we look at pending sales down slightly in Seattle and up slightly in Bellevue, but overall, year over year down 14.5% in pending sales from last year in San Bellevue, down 23.1%.

So we’re seeing both declines in new listings and pending sales. Larger declines in new listings. Closed sales, Seattle 25.6% down and down just slightly from last month in Bellevue was at 83 closed sales versus 94 last month down 18.6% year over year. And all that gives us our supply here. So we have in Seattle 7.6% fewer homes than we did last year on the market in June, 2022. And that was as things were starting to shift and slow down, uh, in 2022, right, right before the market corrected pretty dramatically in Bellevue, down 29.9% in the supply numbers. That brings us to the conversation about months of supply. And we talk about this number because that’s a good indicator of how many houses are available versus all the buyers. So all these numbers get synthesized into this data point. And if we look at supply numbers, last month we had 1.5 months of supply in Seattle, 1.6 months of supply in Bellevue.

And if we look at this month, we saw a, a very small jump, 1.7% in Seattle, which is 0.2%. Same thing in Bellevue, up to 1.8% of inventory. And I mentioned what we’ve been seeing over the last few months is just a slow uptick in the supply numbers, but it wasn’t enough earlier on in the spring. And now we’re starting to see as we hit the summer inventory that we are seeing more houses list. But again, we’re still way below the normals. So what is that going to mean for the market? And I think as we look at the days on market, we’re seeing that things are still selling quickly and a lot quicker than they were. So if we look at year over year data, Seattle, seven days on market was a median that’s up from last year. Bellevue, five days median last month, which is down from last year.

If we look at the average days, we’re seeing a jump in Seattle as well, uh, up to 15 days for the average Bellevue, 22 days on market on the average. And both of those are considerably up from last year, but about the same as where they were last month. So we’re not seeing much change there. But the average and median have been getting closer and closer. The average days on market being 15 in Seattle versus the seven days for the median Bellevue, 22 days average versus five for the median. So there’s still quite a bit of variance there. So some houses are certainly sitting on the market for a little bit and some are selling quickly, but they’re tending to sell quicker and quicker. So speed things are selling faster, they’re obviously selling for more. We talked about that with the median sales prices. But the competition, and this is just experience here recently, it’s starting to slow down a little bit.

Um, not everything is selling immediately. Some things are just getting one offer. There are still multiple offers as we see with the percentage of list price. So if we look at the average percentage of list price in Seattle and Bellevue, Seattle was 2.2 above asking price. Uh, and Bellevue was 0.9% above asking price. So in both cities, we’re seeing houses selling above asking price, which just means there’s competition, right? Nobody pays above asking price if they don’t need to. Um, I’d say buyers prefer to pay less if we’re really honest. And the percentage of the original list price, and this is a, a big indicator that we’re not seeing as many price reductions and that is that Bellevue’s average is exactly a hundred percent. So it’s just the asking price is the average of the original list price, and Seattle’s actually above, so we’re not seeing as many price reductions.

So that number is higher, it’s closer to the same number as that percentage of list price received. And if I, if I was to say anything about what’s happening right now, I think that competition has been picking up and there are buyers that wanna buy a house, they’re excited. We’ve seen home prices increase considerably since the beginning of the year, even with mortgage interest rates increasing. But at some point something has to give, rates have now climbed up over seven people can still afford housing. But the trick is the prices have climbed so much that it makes it even tougher to afford. So I think we’re, we’re encountering a little bit of that. And I think the biggest change right now is that we’re just seeing more houses on the market, there’s more things available and so people have some more options to choose from.

So for sellers, I still think you’re gonna be getting from what we’re seeing fairly similar prices to last year before things really dipped off. But at the same time, the competition level is starting to feel more like summer. Again, it’s not feeling as much like a elongated spring market like we were encountering. And I think for buyers, you’re probably still going to encounter competition, especially on the really awesome properties. But there are going to be some, I think that are going to start to sit a little bit or see a little bit longer days on market. And that’s necessarily a bad thing, right? It just means that there aren’t 25 people that really like that house and not every house is going to attract that type of attention. But I think more importantly, you want to be ready if you’re a buyer, right, to capitalize on what’s going on right now.

And there are still opportunities for buyers out there, but like I mentioned, it’s starting to get more difficult to afford the prices with the interest rates because the prices have now come back up to where they almost were at the same time last year. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Seattle Real Estate Market update. I know if you made it to the end of this video that you got a lot of value out of it. So a couple favors that I have for you. Number one, please subscribe to the channel if you haven’t yet. And if this video could bring value to somebody that you know, please share it with them.