Seattle Housing Market Watch 11/26/2024

Hey y’all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Housing Market Watch for November 26th, 2024. Happy Thanksgiving week everyone. I’m excited to celebrate the holiday with my family and I hope you are looking forward to that as well. And as I mentioned before, Thanksgiving week or the holidays in general is typically when we start to see the housing market slowing down here in the Seattle area. And we’re seeing the signs of that. And not only are we in Thanksgiving week now, last week we had the storm of the decade as the news is calling it a bomb cyclone. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what that means, but it sounds like our version of a hurricane, it was intense for some. I think the east side of Seattle saw the worst. Some of my clients lost fences or had trees blow on their roof.

Not ideal, but it seems like overall the majority of people experienced power outages and or internet and sell outages. That was at least what we experienced. No property damage or damage to any people, which is always good. I think it was most concern about people in my family being safe and clients and friends being safe. Secondly, property as well. So it seems like, again, a lot of just smaller stuff that we dealt with, but at the same time, a big ordeal last week here in the Seattle area. I do think that affected the listings maybe a little bit. People were planning to list, maybe they paused and held off, but as we’re seeing now, we’re going to be in Thanksgiving. So I would guess that anybody who held off last week is not listing right now, maybe waiting until after the holiday. I know I have a listing coming on next week.

And then I think we’re going to start to see things really slow down even more, which would be a normal cycle here in the Seattle area. So as far as buyers go, the majority of the inventory that’s going to be on the market, the rest of the year is already on the market. And if there is anything new coming on, it will be few and far between as we head towards the rest of the year. Most of the listings would come on after the new year, I would bet, based on just historical trends. So right now we’re seeing that drop off already reflected in listings, new listings this week, 258 across King and Snohomish County. Looking at the residential listings 421 last week. So we saw that drop off. We saw price reductions, 230 price reductions last week. We had 360 price reductions. Conting sales, 18 versus 15.

This number has remained relatively stable here most of the year, to be honest. And if we look at the pending sales, pending sales, surprisingly are staying relatively similar. 6 75, 2 weeks back. And then the previous week that we’re looking at here, 607 pending listings, sold listings also relatively stable here, 546 versus 5 81, looking back at last week’s update. And then the big thing here, interest rates, right? We’ve been following interest rates, talking about them a lot, maybe even more than we should have this year, but I think it’s the hot button topic that everybody wants to talk about. 6.95 right now for a 30 year fixed rate on mortgage news daily survey. They’re saying that we’re nearing lowest in a month and really the last month rates have gone back up towards seven. So last week or last week’s update, 7.08, 6.95 this week. So a little bit down.

And really since the fed rate was reduced, we’ve seen rates go up. And I’ve explained this in some other videos, so I won’t talk about it here today, but we are in this place where we’re still hovering right around 7% for the rates. But the buyer activity has picked up a lot here over the past few weeks. And even just thinking about the last couple weeks, I’ve had multiple offer situations in a few different cases with clients. One, interestingly, we made an offer on this house that had been on the market for, I dunno, four or five months I think it was back in the summer when it went on the market. It had seen multiple price reductions came off the market, came back on the market. And of course, the day we make an offer, it gets multiple offers. You got to be kidding, right?

But I think that’s because there’s more buyers in the market right now. And that particular person took their house off the market because it had been so long and just kind of let it sit for a few weeks through the election and to kind of see what was going to happen. Again, they’d had their house on the market since early summer, but also experiencing multiple offers even today in a situation where it looks like maybe there’s going to be 10 or more offers on a house. And I think I’m a little surprised at the number of buyers in the market right now given that rates are so high. But on the other hand, I am not surprised because we now have the clarity in the election. People now can remove that uncertainty from their list. Yeah, rates are still higher, but I think there’s hope still that rates are going to come down at some point here soon or at least relatively soon.

And we also have clarity about the election and what the next four years are most likely going to look like and how they’re going to play out. So I think that’s the change in the sentiment for buyers. And the buyers been there, right? They’ve just been on the sidelines. We’ve talked about that as well. Buyers not being able to or choosing to, in most cases, make a purchase when they’ve got rents that are significantly cheaper right now. When you start to look at rent versus buy, when the rates are higher like they are right now, the calculus doesn’t play out as well in the favor of buying unless you’re planning on holding on for the long term and then refinancing, right? So that short term, Hey, if I’m only going to do this for a couple years, the rent’s a lot cheaper than the purchase.

How does this make sense? Does this make sense for me? And last week I talked about how it doesn’t always make sense to make a home purchase right now. Sometimes you need to weigh all those different situational variables. And sometimes the answer is no. It doesn’t make sense to buy a house. So if you’re somebody who finds themselves trying to figure out, should I buy, should I wait? Feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to have a conversation, talk about your specific situation. You can also just comment and I’m happy to comment back and give you my best answer here virtually as well. So again, thanks so much for tuning in. If there’s any way I can bring value to your situation, I’d love to be a resource. And as always, if there’s more content that you’d like to see in the future, please consider subscribing.