Seattle Housing Market Watch 07/23/2024

Hey all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for July 23rd, 2024.

Well, it’s been an interesting last couple of weeks here in America, specifically around the political world and the election that’s coming up. We have discussed briefly over the past couple of weeks about how the elections don’t typically have much of an effect that is measurable on the housing market, although some people do tend to at least ask those types of questions. There is sometimes a little bit of a slowdown as far as maybe purchasing or listing during the elections leading up to it, but it’s usually not much of an impact. As we have talked about over the past couple of weeks now, we had an assassination attempt. We’ve had a candidate step down. A lot has been happening in the news. What we haven’t been seeing is much of an effect on the mortgage rates as a result. But what we did here a few weeks ago was that the inflation numbers were better than expected and we have seen rates pull back just a tiny bit.

As a result this week, mortgage News Daily’s survey has us at 6.87% for the 30 year fix. Last week was at 6.84. Rates have remained pretty steady over the past week. Now that 6.84 was the first time we had dropped down below 7% in quite a while. We kind of stagnated just above 7% for a lot of the spring. So here we are. Rates have come down a little bit. If we look back at last week, I talked about how we had quite a few more new listings coming on than we had previously. Some of those being pent up from the holidays, specifically 4th of July, and now we’re looking at new listings this week and we saw about 125 fewer new listings in King and Snohomish County over the last week. Fairly substantial. I feel like we’re more kind of back in line. 7 73 was the number more back in line with what we’ve been seeing most of the spring and summer so far outside of those couple weeks.

Right around the 4th of July, we did see fewer price reductions last week, five 17 last week, 4 68 in our last week here since our video, if we look at the listings that have gone pending, we had 7 49 in the previous video. Today as we’re looking at last week’s data, 8 61 pending sales, so a big jump in the pending sales. So we saw a drop off in new listings, a jump in the pending sales. That just means that things are going to tighten up just a little bit. And we talked about how last week that typically in the summer we see more houses coming on the market, things may be taking a little bit more time, a little less competition as a result of more options, right? And that is a huge part when it comes to real estate. You have the economic trends, right? You have bigger trends in the US and the economy, but then you also have the local markets, which are their own animal, so to speak.

These factors play a huge role in what people are willing to pay to live where and how much real estate is available in a given area. So I don’t want to discount the more broad national economics when we talk about real estate, but I do want to emphasize how much the local part is a huge player when it comes to the real estate market. So as we are discussing in these videos each week, we’re really looking at supply and demand on a regular basis. Every single week we’re looking at what’s coming on, what’s coming off, and how that’s affecting the housing market. And then we look back on a monthly basis at the stats, the data prices, things like that. But the amount of inventory and the competition, the demand for the housing has a big effect on those numbers that we look at at the end of each month.

So sold listings have been slowing down a tiny bit. We had 6 71 last week, 6 0 4 this week. Again, the middle of the month is not a huge time where a lot of the listings are selling. We typically have quite a few of them closing towards the end of the month. So I expect that we’ll see those numbers taking back up, especially with the pending listings. Increasing canceled listings. We don’t talk about those every week, but we had 155 last week, 131 this week, fewer canceled listings, so fewer price reductions and canceled listings. A lot of times those are going hand in hand. Maybe a house coming back on the market, so to speak, or being re-listed after being canceled maybe at a different price would also count as a price reduction. So as we’re looking at the data, what I’m seeing is a little bit less activity, but really what we would expect to see as far as new listings, buyer activities picking up a little bit, and I heard last week that we were seeing mortgage applications increasing last week as a result of some of these rates coming down.

And it wouldn’t surprise me that we have more buyers out in the market or considering it, hearing some of the news around the inflation numbers being better than expected. And I think we’ve talked about all year that we’re really waiting for the interest rates to start coming down for the Fed to start lowering those rates. When that happens, we will see a lot more buyers coming back to the market and some already have this year with that expectation. Others have still been holding off, and I expect that we will see more and more coming, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see, and many are this, that we will see an adjustment to the fed rate sooner rather than later, especially given some of the political conversations happening right now. So we’ll continue to pay attention to it. If you got some value out of this video, please, please give it a thumbs up. And if you would like to see more videos like this, please consider subscribing to the channel.