Seattle Real Estate Market Update | December 2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate market update for December, 2024. Well, the end of 2024 is here, and what a ride it’s been. We’ve seen housing prices going up in the spring, a relatively competitive housing market, and now we’ve seen the summer kind of slow down and we’re coming out of that right now into the winter as we are starting to see the housing inventory shrinking. And I think that’s the big story right now that the houses on the market are selling and we’re not seeing a lot of houses coming on the market and the result is fewer and fewer houses on the market. And if there’s anything, I know when there’s fewer houses on the market, there is going to be more competition for the ones that are on the market. So before we get into more of the data here, I want to share a couple stories.

Really, this month was really fun for me in a lot of ways. I got to work with multiple clients that I’ve worked with in the past to either buy or sell a home in the past month. And some of these were listings maybe that I’ve got to work on for the past few months, but it’s always a joy to get to work with clients that I’ve worked with before. And of course I love meeting new clients too, but there’s something special about helping someone with a purchase or sale and doing that again and earning their trust a second time. So I’m just super grateful and as we’re celebrating the holidays, that’s on my mind getting to have these opportunities again. And of course if you are somebody that’s tuning in and we haven’t had a chance to work together, I’d also love to connect with you.

Now before we talk about some of the data here, let’s talk about interest rates because 20 24, 20 23, and let’s just be honest, 2022, there’s just been a lot of focus on interest rates. What are interest rates? How’s it affecting the housing market? I can’t say I like talking about it all the time. I’m a little tired of it, but the mortgage rates due have an impact on the housing market. Right now we’re looking at 6.78 on Mortgage News daily survey here this morning. And rates have been hovering in that 6, 7, 5 range the last couple days, but more recently right around seven or even a little bit over. And for much of the year, I would say we’ve been kind of around seven, somewhere with a time, right around six in upper fives, which was amazing. And I would say that’s what we’re looking at for 2025.

I think the last Trump presidency rates were relatively stable, kind of in the fours to low fives, and I would expect that’s kind of where we’ll end up eventually, but it might be a little slower getting there than some had expected. A lot of the bigger real estate companies are predicting we’re going to be right around that 6% range here at some point in 2025. It may take us a little time to get there. That would be enough for me to consider refinancing my rate right now, 6.99 on my current house. And so if I can save a whole percentage point in interest, I’m certainly going to be looking at doing that. Might not be as much as I would’ve liked to save getting down to 5% or 4%. I don’t think we’re going to drop off that quickly. We’d have to have some type of a bigger scenario like a war or a recession, something that’s a little bit more or a pandemic, heck, something more to catalyze rates dropping down.

But at this point, that’s not what we’re looking at. So for now, I think we’re looking at right around 6% or so. We’ll talk more about predictions though next week. So don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Let’s look though and recap, Ken, as we’re wrapping up 2024 here. And median sales price in Seattle is up year over year, 3.3% at nine 50. Bellevue on the other side of the water, 1.8 1 2, 5 0.7% over last year’s median sales price and something that’s just been steady, the price is going up, not as dramatically, but recovering from the 2022 year in both Seattle and Bellevue. Back a couple years ago, we were looking at eight 90 in Seattle, so Seattle didn’t see as much of a dropoff. Dollar wise, prices are lower. We are at one five in Bellevue, so we’ve seen a jump back in both cases, but Bellevue has been seeing a bigger rebound in prices more so than even Seattle, but they also fell quite a bit more from their highs.

Now let’s look at percentage over asking price because this is interesting. Bellevue’s already starting to see quite a bit of a jump in November, which is odd, 2% over asking price 2% over asking price in Bellevue and in Seattle, just under asking price pretty much right at asking 99.9% to be more precise. But we’re seeing that competition start returning as the amount of inventory shrinks. And we’re seeing that with days on market too, right? As we’re looking at the median days on market, Seattle’s been trending down overall for the year, right around 13 days here for the median, 28 for the average though. So we still got some inventory that hasn’t been selling and it’s been sitting Bellevue. Six days was the median last month, 17 days on the average. So again, still a little bit of inventory that’s been sitting, but the trend has been downwards overall for the year.

And not surprisingly, inventory is dropping off really quick when we talk about inventory. New listings is a big part of that. Many houses are coming on the market. Seattle, we saw 371, which was a lot less than we saw last month. Bellevue 35, again, a lot less than we saw last month. It’s normal to see fewer listings this time of year, it really is. But in comparison, a couple years ago, 2022, we saw 4 73 in Seattle 3 71 this month, which is only one less than we saw last year, 64 in 2022 versus 35 in Bellevue, so significantly less, but the close sales are actually up year over year. So we saw 4 59 close sales again more than the new listings in Bellevue, 78, more than double the new listings. And what happens is when you have more closed sales and more pending sales, which we also saw, you start to see that the amount of houses available is shrinking.

And if we look at those numbers, we’re at 1.8 months of supply in Seattle, which is down quite a bit from where we were in the mid to upper twos just a few months back. And now Bellevue under a month of supply, which is a big reason why we’re seeing houses selling over asking price. I think that one month of supply is a magic number. You get below that and there really aren’t a lot of houses available, and all of a sudden everything becomes an amazing house. When there’s scarcity, everything looks better and more exciting. You just want to make something happen. And that phenomena is already there in Bellevue. We’re not quite there in Seattle. I would say there’s more options still on the market right now, especially if you’re looking in Seattle. That’s going to change pretty soon. If you’re a buyer, and I shared this in my King and Snohomish County updates as well, if you want a little bit more of a broad brush of the area, those would be great updates to check out as well as the weekly Seattle housing market Watch where we’re looking at King incident, Hommes County data on a weekly basis, because a lot of that feeds into this.

I already knew essentially what we’d be looking at just from talking about those numbers on a regular basis. But the big thing for buyers, buyers, you have more options right now and they are dwindling. It doesn’t mean that they’re the best options. Some of those options are houses that have been sitting on the market for a while and they’re sitting on the market because they’re something wrong with them or unredeemable, maybe they’re right underneath the five 20 bridge or they are on a super busy street, or the lot’s really sloped and not amazing. There are certain things that you can’t change about a house, and those would be things you would want to consider looking away from, not looking away from in the sense of, Hey, I’m just going to buy it anyway, but maybe I shouldn’t buy this house. I can’t change it. These things that are making it not sell.

Other times there are things you can change about the house or the house is just overpriced. There’s nothing really wrong with it, it’s just 50, a hundred thousand over and maybe there’s room for negotiation, we can get a deal done. So for buyers, I would be looking cautiously optimistic is what I would say right now. Cautiously optimistic is the word for buyers because there will be more options in the spring and then even in the winter, later winter. But you might have to be patient. And if you don’t like something right now, I wouldn’t force it. If you are a seller, there is an opportunity to have competition right now. So if you have a great house, right, it’s ready to go on the market, I think that you can make that happen. I would caution maybe the higher end home coming on the market right now, but if you have a house that’s in that median price range where everybody’s searching and there’s a lot of buyers still, this is a great time to get your house on the market with less competition for the listing, right?

There aren’t as many houses, supply numbers are dwindling. The more luxury house I would caution getting on the market. Now, maybe you’re wait until after the new year where that buyer pool maybe is more apt to want to make a purchase. And if you’re in that first time home buyer price point though, you’re going to be having buyers buying all the time. So that’s where it probably depends on the property, whether you consider listing now or waiting until the new year. And let’s be honest, it’s already mid-December at this point. So if you’re thinking about listing, you probably want to take a little bit of time to prep your house. I think that’s important too. So buyers, this is a time to start before the new year, at least be ready for the new year for a mortgage that’s maybe a buyer consultation, whether that’s with me or with somebody else that you already know.

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But I think it’s important to be getting ready. And same thing with sellers getting ready. It sometimes takes a month or two to get your house ready to go on the market. So this is the time to start having conversations. This is the time to start making prep work on the house or prepping to make that purchase as there is generally a little bit more time in a sense. I know that a lot of people are busy with the holidays too though. So as we wrap up here, happy holidays to everybody. If you have questions about buying or selling here in the Seattle Bellevue region, I’d love to be a resource for you and we’ll see you here soon.