Seattle Housing Market Watch 11/19/2024

Hey y’all, it’s Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for November 19th, 2024. Well, we are a few months into the month of November here, and things have been slowly tightening up. The inventory has been shrinking and we’ve been seeing a lot of buyers, again, buying houses that have been sitting on the market for a little while. In fact, one of my clients just closed on a purchase in Queen Anne where they were able to get a house that had been on the market for almost 60 days and they were able to get the house for more than 200,000 below the original asking price, which is a huge win for them and a relief to the sellers. And that is the buyer’s advantage this time of year is there are usually some houses that were on the market for quite a bit of time in the summer and they’re now trying to get sold here before the holidays.

So buyers, this is actually a great time to be looking at what’s out there, houses maybe that are over budget, but maybe close, and there might be some opportunities to snag something that has been sitting on the market for a little while. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with it, it just was a little bit overpriced to start with. Let’s talk about what’s going on here with the numbers as we do that every single week so we can see what’s shifting and changing here in the Seattle housing market on a weekly basis. And let’s start off with the listings because we have seen a slight uptick from the beginning of the month. So the week of November 7th, which would’ve been a couple weeks ago before we did the monthly market update last week, 390 new listings we saw 421 single family listings in King and Snohomish County here over the past week.

So a slight uptick in the amount of houses coming on the market. We did see also an uptick in price reduction, so we had 278 that week this week, 360 price reduction. So again, people wanting to get their houses sold. If we look at the pending sales, pending sales are pretty similar. We had 6 66 that week, 6 75 this week. So talking about how we’re seeing the activity from buyers here and it is outpacing the new listings and then sold listings a couple weeks back, 5 84 would’ve included some of the end of the month sales. We’re mid month right now. We had 581 closed sales, and a lot of those would’ve been under contract last month. But we’re just seeing the inventory starting to dwindle, and that puts pressure on prices. And that’s why we talk about the fall being this kind of transition from maybe a little more inventory than is needed in the late summer, early fall to wow, we don’t have enough houses on the market for all the buyers.

And we’re in this transition phase right now, and we at the end of the month actually had some of the highest inventory we’ve had in like 10 years. And so we’re seeing that inventory now starting to dwindle. And I think as we get into the new year, we’re going to have quite a bit fewer houses on the market, again, which is going to set up a fairly aggressive competitive spring market here in the Seattle area. It’s not much of a crazy prediction as more of a pointing towards normal trends. So there’s nothing outside of the norm that I’m seeing there. Now, if we look at the mortgage rates, we’re seeing mortgage rates up a little bit from prior weeks, but we’re about the same, just over 7% on mortgage news daily survey, 7.08%. Things haven’t been changing as much. They were trending up for about a month after that first fed rate cut, but they’ve remained relatively flat here over the past few weeks.

And something that I think people have been asking or considering is what’s going to happen to the rates and the housing market now that we have our president elect? And something that’s interesting. I think in general, the economy has been, or the stock market has been bouncing and improving and in speculation that profits are going to be higher under a Donald Trump presidency. But as we look at mortgage rates and we look at the inflationary data, it’s interesting to think, will we continue on this path of less inflation or will we hit another period of inflation? And I’m remembering back to his first presidency in 2018 and into 2019. We saw the housing market slow down and pull back as a result of some of his policies, but also seeing inflation happening. So the Fed was raising rates in response to the inflation and looking at where we’re at now, rates are far beyond where they were during Trump’s first presidency, but we did see the housing market slowed down because the economy was doing better and we were experiencing an inflationary period.

So the big question is, are we going to see things slowing down or pulling back in response to maybe a better economy under Trump? And at this point, I want to promote the question. I want to bring it up because we are heading into a second term of Trump as the president, and we’re also trying to figure out and bounce back from a housing market that’s been struggling over the past few years. So I’m uncertain as far as what’s going to transpire think at this point for now, we’ll continue on our trend, but what’s to come in a year, two years down the road, I guess remains to be seen? I think the biggest thing just to bring up about real estate is that timing the market is really challenging. It is usually very obvious when things are bad and you can start to see if interest rates are increasing.

A lot of times you can think, okay, maybe this is a time to sell, but it’s not always convenient. If you are living in your house, and I work with a lot of people that are buying houses to live in, they’re not always rental properties. And so you’re not necessarily in that mode where you’re like, well, hey, I got to get it at the lowest price and sell it at the highest price. It doesn’t really matter what else is going on in my life, whether I like my house. A lot of the people I work with want to live in their house. And so thinking about maybe less of a two to five year window and more of a five to seven, seven to 10 year window, that would be more of the historical average of time in a house. And so over the longer haul, no matter what’s going on here in the housing market, you’re going to see things going up, generally speaking in most major markets.

But if you’re trying to time it or you don’t have as long of a time horizon, maybe it doesn’t make sense to buy. And you heard me say it, I don’t think buying makes sense for everyone. There are people, and I was talking with a client recently who was sharing about some of his friends in their situations. Maybe you are in a situation where you don’t know if you want to plant roots here. You’re not sure if you want to stay in the area. Maybe you’re thinking about going somewhere else for work. Maybe you don’t have the financial flexibility or want to pay double for mortgage versus rent with higher interest rates. The math is not as easy to do when you think about renting versus owning. And we could talk through some of the scenarios, but if you have a short time horizon or you might need the flexibility, maybe it doesn’t make sense.

I’ve seen many listings here that sold in 2022 or 2023 that are starting to be sold again because people had to move or things changed. And in a lot of those cases, people are selling for less now. If they had 10 years, not going to be as big of a deal, right? They’re going to come out ahead. So I would think if I was a buyer, somebody thinking about buying, what is my situation? What’s my time horizon? What are my goals, right? And does buying a house fit inside of those goals? And sometimes it doesn’t. Well, a little bit of a tangent here as we wrapped up this update, but I think it’s important to consider what are your goals? Why are you trying to buy a house or thinking about buying a house? And if you want to have a conversation like that with me or have questions about that, I’m happy to answer that. As hard as it is to believe, I don’t think it is the best idea for everyone to buy a house. It really depends on people’s situations. And of course, if you want to follow along with these updates on a regular basis, please subscribe.