Seattle Housing Market Watch 12/24/2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for December 24th, 2024. Merry Christmas Eve. We’re going to be recording the last housing market watch here for 2024, and it’s been an interesting year here in 2024, seeing the boom in the spring, things slowing down in the summer, and then things starting to pick back up again in the fall. And I would say that’s a pretty normal year in the Seattle housing market. One thing that we did not see this year was a massive drop in interest rates. Interest rates have hovered in the mid sixes to low sevens. We did have a short period where rates were down right around six, but overall rates have kind of been in that upper six low sevens region, and it looks like they might stay there for longer as we look into 2025.

Something I want to talk about though is just the normal slowdown here around the holidays, and many aren’t even going to be listening to this video because they’re taking a little bit of a break to hang out with family and friends. And as I’m looking at the last few weeks of data, the housing market has been slowly, slowly seeing inventory shrinking here in the Seattle market. If you look back a few weeks ago, we had 289 new listings come on, 229 last week, and then 142 over the past seven days here, but we’re still seeing a lot of pending listings though, 546, then we saw 556 and then this week with only 142 new listings, 450 pending sales. And so a lot of the houses that have been on the market are coming off the market and we’re seeing a considerably larger amount of pending sales, right than the new listing inventory, which just means we’re going to have fewer and fewer houses available to start 2025.

And around here we see, and in any market, but particularly in Seattle, what we’ve seen is that as the inventory is nearing that one month mark, which it is, if we look back at the end of last month, we start to see competition returning to the market, multiple offers. And I’ve experienced that with multiple clients here over the past few weeks where we’re competing for houses and in some cases getting beat out by people that are going to be really aggressive like it’s the spring even though we’re in the middle of the winter right now. So interesting to see that transition starting to happen right now as the inventory is starting to hit, in my opinion, that level where we see competition in the housing market here in Seattle. We’re seeing normal things here as we wrap up the year, we’re seeing listings canceled, taken off the market maybe to come back on at the beginning of the year.

We’ve seen the listings shrinking, the amount of listings coming on the market, and as well as the inventory overall. We’re seeing a continued stream of pending listings sold listings 494 sold listings over the last week, but it’s going to slow down as we wrap up the rest of this week and next week with New Year’s, we’re going to see more closings, we’re going to see even fewer listings coming on the market and more closings again, pushing the inventory numbers down and increasing the competition heading into 2025. So I want to just take a moment and wish everybody a happy holidays. Happy New Year, Merry Christmas as we are heading into the holiday season. This will be the last market watch for 2024, and we might as well talk about the rates here as we wrap it up 7.1 today. So right in that same range that we’ve been in all year. And if there’s any questions that you have here about buying or selling real estate in the Seattle area, maybe you’re curious about your situation and if it makes sense to make a purchase or to sell one of your properties, feel free to reach out and we’ll see you after the new year.