Seattle Housing Market Watch 10/02/2024

Hey, I’ll Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for October 2nd, 2024. Well, first update of October, and that means that we’ve got some fresh monthly data, and I’m not going to share that here at the beginning. I’ll save a few little tidbits for the end, but for now we’re going to jump into the normal market watch stats and we’ll start off with mortgage rates because that’s been a huge topic of conversation here really for the last couple of years. But more importantly, over the past few months as rates have been coming down, rates have been coming down on mortgages for the past few months, but they have been trending up since the recent Fed cut. And for those that are new to the channel, we’ve been talking about this as well, that the mortgage rates aren’t directly tied to the federal funds rate, which was dropped a half percent a few weeks back, which is great news.

But the signaling has been that that’s not going to be the continued trend, or at least for now. And so the market here for the mortgages is not responding with as much excitement and enthusiasm as it once was. So here we are looking at a 6.25 rate according to Mortgage News Daily’s daily report, and they’re putting this out. You can follow along if you’re super curious about this or you can just keep listening to this video here and following along this way. But rates are trending up. So the headline for today is that mortgage rates are nearing one month highs, but that’s still pretty great. And it is. I mean rates were seven and a half earlier in the year, seven and a quarter most of the year hovering around seven. So we’ve been trending down and they were much higher a couple of years back.

But now we’re kind of in this low sixes territory. We were flirting with upper fives and in some cases certain types of loans. You can get below 6% right now, but the majority of loans are going to be 30 year fixed rate and you’re looking at a little bit over 6%. Now that’s a good thing. Will rates continue to go down? Many think that’s the case. The signaling right now from the Fed is that they’re going to hold at least that’s again the signaling they’re going to be holding firm for a little bit, which could keep rates in this low sixes range. But if we do end up getting into the fives, I think mid to fives is probably where we would see a lot more activity. But we’ve already been seeing the home buyer activity picking up, and we can just see that from our market watch stats that we look at every single week here in the Seattle area.

And real estate is hyper-local. There are national stats and averages and things like that, but the most important thing to pay attention to when you’re thinking about real estate data is what’s happening right here, right now. And so in the Seattle area and every week we look at King and Snohomish County stats, we’re seeing the pending sales picking up, and they’ve continued to elevated. We’ve seen 934 pending sales over the past week. And again, this is closer to sold listing. So this would be homes that did have an inspection contingency and are now pending sale, some that are fresh to that pending status, but that is outweighing the new listings. So across King in Snohomish County, we’re seeing more listings coming off the market than going on the market. And the new listing number here, 638 over the past week in closings as well, 737.

So we’ve been seeing this happening for most of the last month, which is why we’re seeing more sold listings right now than new listings. We’re also at the end of the month, so the last week encompasses the end of September, beginning of October. So any of those sales that are squeaking in here and sliding in underneath the tag, if you’re a baseball fan, it’s October and the Mariners didn’t make it. Again, if we look at the price reductions though, this is also telling 552 price reductions that’s nearing the amount of new listings. So it is becoming more common to see price reductions again, we’ve seen that over the past month as well. And these are all things that are common. There’s nothing uncommon about what’s happening right now in the housing market. And I want to stress that every fall, end of summer, beginning of fall is a slower time in the housing market, primarily because you start to see kind of that last flood of inventory to build on top of maybe some of the houses that were listed in the summer that hadn’t sold yet.

So we are about to enter into over the next, maybe I’d say a month, a month from now, we’re going to start to see all this going backwards. We’re going to be seeing shrinking, we’re going to be seeing less inventory. But for now, I think it’s important to point out that in September we saw the most amount of new listings in Seattle. And I didn’t pull this for all of King and Snohomish County yet. We’ll talk about that more next week in the King and Snohomish County market updates and even in further detail as well in the Seattle update. But for now, I just want to just get that out there that we saw the most amount of new listings this September than we’ve seen since September, 2022. Now, we saw a little bit more previously, but the last year and a half we’ve seen a tightening of the houses for sale, new listings, and a lot of that had to do with mortgage rates and a lot of other factors.

But let’s just say mortgage rates played a huge piece in that people that aren’t maybe buying and selling, people holding onto their properties because they have great rates, but this month we saw the most new listings in the last two years. And so I think that’s important to point out. We also have seen that those listing numbers have been elevating. And so not only have we seen more listings, but we have been seeing the amount of houses for sale also increasing. So the amount of supply has been increasing in the last three or four weeks. I have noticed this shifting. And the shifting is more towards what I would consider a normal fall where we start to see that houses aren’t selling immediately and maybe it takes a few weeks to sell or maybe there’s a price reduction. We’ve been talking about that. And there was a hope, and I’ve shared this too, that if we were seeing the mortgage rates continue to trend down, that we might see a different effect this fall.

We might see things heat up, but with rates staying where they’re at, we’re not seeing an additional kind of spring selling season right now. And that just says that we’re not quite there yet, not quite out of all of this slowdown. And so as we are looking at the market, I have a few listings even myself right now that are taking a little bit of time to sell. I’ve also had plenty sell pretty quickly. So it’s not every single listing, every neighborhood’s different, every house is different. But there are plenty of houses that are fitting into this, as we were talking about, that are having a price reduction. Maybe they’re taking 20, 30 days to sell. They’re not selling in a week, but the median is still 11 days in Seattle. And again, we’ll talk more about that in our monthly updates. But for now, inventory’s building, we’ve been seeing a lot of sales happening.

And across King in Snohomish County, more so Seattle is its own city, right? King in Snohomish County encompasses the greater Seattle area. I would argue that for the two counties put together that Seattle is maybe a little bit slower than the total overall county wide picture, but again, we are in a slower time of the year. And so what’s going to happen now over the next couple months as we wrap up the year is we are going to see the amount of homes dwindle. We’re going to see some of those houses that are taking a little bit of time, they’re going to sell. There’s going to be less options. And then as we head into the beginning of 2025, we’re going to have a lower inventory environment and we’re going to be past a presidential election. And as we head into that season, I think a lot has to do with where the rates are as far as how hot it’s going to be in 2025.

But for now, there’s a lot of options if you’re a buyer to consider. There are opportunities to buy getting price reductions with less competition right now, but you are going to have a higher rate. And sellers, you’ve probably still got about a month window before it starts to slow down for the holidays. And it does really slow down as far as the amount of buyers searching. So if you have questions about any of this and you want to connect, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to connect. And as always, if this is valuable content for you, please consider subscribing and following along.