Seattle Housing Market Watch 1/15/2025

Hey y’all, it’s Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for January 15th, 2025. Welcome back to the weekly Seattle Housing Market Watch. We’re going to do these most every week outside of the monthly market update weeks. That is usually the first Tuesday of the month, so about three times a month. We’re going to be looking at the weekly stats for King and Snohomish County single family sales. And as we’re getting back into these, we will look at some of the inventory coming off, inventory coming off. So we’re kind of looking at how’s the market moving? Less focused on prices and statistical numbers and more on, okay, what’s the market looking like this week? What have we seen listed? What have we seen pending? What have we seen sold looking at last year in some cases? And even comparing what’s going on with the mortgage market, right?

We talk a little bit more about what’s going on with rates and the why behind that. So as we’re getting back into this, this year looks very similar in a lot of ways to last year. That was one of the predictions for 2025, so we’ll see how that is all going to shape out over the rest of the year. If you haven’t seen the predictions video yet, housing Market 2025 Predictions for Seattle. Take a look at that video on the channel. I had my favorite mortgage partner, Dan Keller, join me for that. We’ve got a podcast together as well called Hello Seattle. So that was the first episode of the year on that podcast, and we just published that video now looking at new listings year over year. We’ll see from last year to this year, a pretty good jump in the new listings. We’re still not seeing a lot coming on the market yet, but in comparison to last year, quite a bit better.

3 99 new listings last year at the same time, 254, and we saw some more houses come back on the market. 66, we had 30 come back on the market last year in the same week. It’s nice to be able to look back sometimes right year over year in these updates. Sometimes we’re looking week over week this time. I think focusing on the year over year data is a little bit more exciting to be honest. In looking at pending sales, we saw 556 pending sales last week and last year, 522. So actually more pending sales in this past week than in last year. We also saw more sales 283 versus 256 sales, but again, very similar. I think the biggest difference is going to be that number of new listings coming on the market at the beginning of the year here. And speaking of rates, we mentioned that earlier in the update rates.

Another prediction from the video last week was that we would see rates remaining in a similar place in 2025. I think the hope was, and in many ways the predictions were that rates would be coming down at this point. And while they haven’t, number one, they’ve had little blips where they’ve come down and there’s been excitement and anticipation that we might see the fed rate continue and that inflation was under control, and now it looks like maybe inflation’s not under control and maybe the Fed rate’s not going to keep coming down. And that has caused some more uncertainty. And in a result of that, we’ve seen the rates jumping back up. So last year, 6.77 was the published surveyed rate for mortgage News Daily, and that was as of 1 16 20 24. Today, 1 15, 20 25 we’re looking at 7.13%, so slightly higher, but down a little bit from where they were.

They were closer to seven and a quarter. So seeing some of the more recent inflation data has been encouraging to rates where they had been on an upward trend here for a little bit. But overall, I think the expectation is that we are going to be in a similar market to 2024 and 2025, and maybe even having that hope that this is the year by the end of the year, where we’ll start to see the rates coming down. And if the last couple of years are any indicator, we’ve had moments and times during the year each year where rates have kind of dropped down closer to six, but they’ve made their way back up and we’re kind of in that historical average rate right now, right around 7%, maybe a little more, a little less. If we do get into a situation where maybe inflation is truly under control, maybe we do see rates dropping back down into the low sixes would be great if they drop even more.

I think for people that have higher rates, like me, I bought a house with a higher rate. There are plenty of people that have bought houses over the last couple years with significantly higher rates than maybe the all time lows. Maybe we won’t ever get back to those all time lows, but it would be nice to refinance. And I think also having rates into the five somewhere will certainly help stimulate the housing market and make it more affordable. Right now, what we’ve seen in Seattle, and this is probably the case in other markets, especially the higher priced markets, that the prices are very similar to where they were back in 2022 when we had really low rates. But now as we’ve seen the market recovering, at least price-wise, we still have the high rates. So if you bought a house in 2022 with let’s say it was a three, three and a half percent rate, even if you bought a house at any point, then you still had probably a four and a half to 5% rate.

It wasn’t anything like we have now. You probably got a great deal if you were bought end of 2022, you got a better price and your rate is still actually pretty good compared to the rates that we have now. And prices have continued to go up. So now we have higher rates and we have almost the same prices and considerably higher prices than the rates in that five-ish range. And people are now paying considerably more a month for the same house, even with prices being maybe not that different. And so that hope of refinancing is great. But the monthly payment of people that bought in 2022, yeah, it was a height of the market at the time, and I would argue it’s not going to be the height of the market forever. If you can hold onto your house, you’re probably almost back to even.

But your payment is so much better than people that have been buying more recently. But as the market does continue to get better, maybe it takes a little bit more time, you’re going to be in a great position, you’re going to start building equity, which is everybody’s hope when they purchase a house. And also you’re going to have that better payment that maybe nobody ever is going to get again. So some quick thoughts as we start off the year. If you have questions about buying or selling a house in King County, I’d love to be a resource for you. And if you’re new to the channel, maybe you stumbled upon this video at the start of the year, you’re curious what’s going on in the market here, please consider following along and subscribe.