Seattle Housing Market Watch 12/03/2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for December 3rd, 2024. Welcome back to another Seattle Housing Market Watch. I hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving and looking at some of the data here, it seems like everybody had a little bit of a break over the Thanksgiving holiday. Real estate agents, buyers, sellers. There just wasn’t as much going on here over the past week, and that’s normal during the Thanksgiving week, and I talked about that on our market watch last week, we saw a big drop off in listings. We only had 149 listings versus 258 last week, and this is just getting worse and worse here for the rest of the year. There are not going to be a lot of listings in the month of December. Statistically, I think this week we’re going to have some, maybe next week, a few, but it’s really going to die off here over the rest of the year.

And we had, as I’m looking at the stats from December, I’m going to publish those next week here in the monthly market update. But looking at some of those, a little bit of a sneak peek is that the amount of houses on the market is shrinking and that the supply that we saw built up over the summer and in the fall here is massively dropping off. It’s almost like a cliff looking at the graph. And as I’m looking at the pending sales, a lot of that is because of the amount of pending and sold listings here in the past few weeks versus the amount of houses coming on the market, which then puts pressure on the houses that are for sale. And I saw this, even last week, one of my clients bought a house or it was under contract on a house in Shoreline, pretty close to my house, and we were in a multiple offer scenario where the house sold pretty well over asking price is about 70 grand over asking price and relatively competitive situation.

And maybe a couple months ago, it wouldn’t have been like that at all. Maybe a couple months ago it would’ve sold for asking price or right around there. So I think the decrease in inventory is putting more pressure on those listings. Again, bringing back some of the competition. We’ve been seeing it in certain neighborhoods, but in this particular spot, there weren’t a lot of great comparables for what it might look like in a multiple offer situations. So we had to go into it knowing that we were making a choice. What is our walkaway point, right? We weren’t looking and saying, okay, well this one sold for 5% over this one sold for 8% over this one, sold for 7% over, it’s probably going to sell in this range. It was a little bit of a guessing game, there wasn’t anything good to tell us. Okay, yeah, it’s going to sell this much over asking price.

And as we’re looking at the pending sales, we’re seeing the trend continuing where houses are moving off the market. We had 422 pending sales last week as opposed to the 149 new listings, and we also had 449 sold listings as opposed to the 149 new listings. So the amount of housing is declining, and as a reminder for anybody who’s new, we are always looking at in these updates, king and Snohomish County residential sales over the previous week. And so we’re looking at the suburbs and we’re looking at the city all combined into this one update to give us a good picture for the Seattle Metro area on a weekly basis. And as I mentioned, we’re seeing the inventory declining. That’s been the big trend here over the past few months, and something I expect to continue, that means for buyers that it will be more competitive as the year wraps up.

It also means that this spring is going to be more competitive, especially given the amount of inventory on the market. We’re now entering into seller’s market territory with the amount of inventory on the market, and I’ll share a little bit more about that in the monthly market update next week. But let’s talk about interest rate here briefly before we wrap up because interest rates have continued to remain about the same down a little bit week over week. Mortgage news daily survey says 6.91% was the mortgage rate on average, and last week we were at 6.95, but again, right around 7% for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Of course, different loan types have different prices. Your situation also determines your mortgage rate depending on the amount you’re putting down and your credit score, et cetera. I think as we’re looking towards the end of the year, I don’t expect mortgage rates to change much.

I would expect they’d stay about where they’re at unless we had some big news. I think that we are going to continue to see inventory declining until the end of the year, and I think we’re going to see buyers getting started with their home searches as we head into the new year. So we see in many years, I expect that we’ll have this perfect storm brewing, kind of like the bomb cyclone that we experienced here in Seattle. I’m glad I was able to use that. By the way, in a video, I think that we will see a storm brewing in January, February where we don’t have a lot of housing inventory on the market, but we have a lot of buyers that are looking to make a purchase, and that usually means multiple offers, houses selling over, asking price, and that’ll be a wild scenario starting off 2025 and one. That would be, in my opinion, not unexpected. Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s Seattle Housing Market Watch. If you have questions about your situation or the housing market here in Seattle, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And if this video was valuable for you and you want to see other ones like it, please hit that subscribe button.