Seattle Real Estate Market Update | August 2025

Hey all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate market update for August, 2025. Well, another month and another market update for you. We’re in almost the spring market here in the Seattle area, and I’d say over the past month, month and a half, we’ve been seeing more inventory coming on the market. We’ve been seeing houses selling faster and for over asking price, we’re starting to see people making offers ahead of the offer view, date, and trying to snag something before it gets all the way to its offer review date. We’ve also seen some pretty crazy multiple offer scenarios. At the same time, we’ve seen plenty of houses that are not selling super fast, not selling over asking price depending on the location in the house. So the housing market has been picking up, seeing more, coming on the market, more buyer activity, but at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee if you’re selling that it’s going to be skyrocketing and selling way over asking price.

And it also doesn’t mean that as a buyer that’s going to be your reality either. Some houses are still not selling with that same frenzy as others. Now, before we get into the update, I always like to share a client story and I had some clients that I’ve worked with before. One of them bought his first house with me almost 10 years ago and was recently married, and I got to work with he and his wife to purchase a new house together, which was really fun and it was a little unique. This house came on the market before Christmas time and the holiday season, the seller pulled it off after putting it on for about a week just to kind of see what would happen, and we were able to go tour it in between the listings and get under contract. It was a week plus long negotiation.

There’s a lot less pressure on the time when the house is off the market. So we were negotiating with them. We said, Hey, yeah, sorry, it’s not going to work out. And we stuck to our number and they reached back out to us and said, Hey, we’ve thought about it more rather than relisting it, we’d rather just sell it to you guys. So not every negotiation works out like that. That’s more of a typical heading into the winter negotiation, right? Where it’s a little less competitive. Right now it seems that we’re back into, Hey, there’s multiple offers, put in your best foot forward. What are you willing to pay over asking price? What contingencies are you willing to remove? In this case, just a few months back, we were able to make it through in a different way where we were able to negotiate the price down and have a little bit more favorable terms versus the alternative here in the current market where it’s a little bit more competitive.

So for those that are in this scenario where it’s starting to get a little bit more competitive, I want to encourage you that that is really normal for this time of year. There are some buyers that maybe haven’t been successful yet and have been waiting for an opportunity. There are also people that have a really tight timeline and they’re really pumped and they have to make it happen. And then there’s just some people that are, I’m going to win no matter what type of people, and it’s hard to compete with that. So what happens is typically this time of year you have some people that are willing to do crazy things because they love the house, and once those people buy, then it gets a little bit easier for people that maybe aren’t as aggressive, but also as more and more supply and more and more choices come on the market, it becomes a little bit easier as well.

So if you’re a buyer right now, take heart, it’s not going to be like this all year, most likely if it’s like any other year. But right now the housing market is getting pretty competitive for buyers out there. If we look at interest rates, I don’t think interest rates are playing a huge piece, at least as far as changing the housing market. There have been hovering around 6.8% for a few weeks. Today’s mortgage news daily survey was 6.79, so nothing really out of the ordinary for the past few weeks, a little lower than where we were to start the year a little around seven. But for buyers, it hasn’t really changed too much over the past couple years. It’s kind of up and down mortgage market. It would be great if we got back into the low sixes, maybe even dropped into the fives, but there is no guarantee of that.

And a little maybe less hope of that now in our current situation than where we were thinking maybe things might head in the fall last year. Let’s look at median sales price. So Seattle 2.1% up from last year, 9 49, 9 50. Bellevue’s median sales price, 7% up 1,862,500. Bellevue has always been way more expensive than Seattle, at least over the past 10 years or so. Over in Bellevue, you’re going to find more planned neighborhoods, newer houses, and closer proximity to the east side. So some people are looking for that and they want newer, nicer, and you tend to pay for newer and nicer, whereas Seattle’s been around for a long time and we have a ton of houses that are built in the early to mid 19 hundreds, a little bit different vibe, a little more character I would say in Seattle depending on the neighborhood that you’re in versus Bellevue where it feels more like a suburb that’s turning into a big city or a bigger city here over the past 10 or so years.

Now, if we look at median sales price trends here over the past couple years, we’re seeing an uptick in Bellevue more substantially because Bellevue’s median sales price, Bellevue’s prices in general fell off quite a bit during 2022. Seattle was a little bit more stable, but we’re still seeing an uptick in prices here in Seattle as well, albeit a little bit more modestly given the prices. But days on market still pretty quick. So Seattle median days on Market six, Bellevue five, and looking at King County data as a whole, that’s a separate update. Those days on market are a little bit higher for the county as a whole, but faster in Seattle, Seattle’s average days are about the same as King County. They’re at 30 days on market. Bellevue being 12, so selling a little bit quicker on average in Bellevue, but those trends have been down over the past few years.

So 20 23, 20 24 to today, we’ve seen a kind of gradual transition from houses being on the market a little bit longer to starting to average a little bit less time on the market. Again, nothing crazy like 2021 or 2022 or at least earlier in the year yet, but a trend downwards in the time on the market, the amount of the asking price right is always a conversation topic. And in 2021 and 2022, we were seeing 10% over asking price and even more. In some cases I saw 30, 40% in some instances that my clients were competing in, which thankfully they didn’t get some of those purchases. But looking at the amount over asking in Seattle, 3.2% on average, which is more than last year. So last year it was a little bit less, 1.4% more this year, Bellevue, 5.2% over asking price on average 2.2% more than the same time last year.

And I like that year over year comparison because it gives a good idea for the same time of year spring market starting to pick up, we’re almost into the spring market. And so seeing how that affects things as well. Real estate is seasonal, so every time of the year has a little bit different number no matter what the market’s doing. And so it’s nice to see those comparisons on that month over month basis, but also more importantly in our case, the year over year basis. Now, let’s look at new listings too. New listings are up barely in Bellevue, 85 new listings, 2.4% more than last year, 10.7% more new listings in Seattle, and that would give us 674 for those that are really really into the data here. If we look at the closed sales, 443 in Seattle, which is slightly down year over year 0.2%, Bellevue, 6.1%, more closed sales, 52, but still not the same amount as what we’ve been seeing coming on.

But the better number for that is going to be pending sales. So close sales would’ve been sales that we’re pending last month. Pending sales now would be the activity that’s currently happening. And in Seattle we saw 7.7% more pending sales. So we saw new listing 6 74, we saw 520 pending sales in Seattle, and then we saw 85 new listings in Bellevue and we saw 55 pending sales in Bellevue. So we are seeing that the amount of homes on the market is trending upwards, right? If you’re seeing more new listings, you’re going to have more of a buildup of the supply. So Seattle saw 38.5% more houses at the end of the month than same time last year, and Bellevue, 22.4% more houses available, and that means that the supply numbers are picking up. Seattle’s getting closer to that magic number where maybe market might slow down a little bit.

1.6 months of supply Bellevue at one month. I tell people when you get closer to two, the closer you are to seeing the housing market stalling out a little bit on price or maybe slowing down a little bit, when you start to get below one month or closer to one month, that’s when you’re seeing a lot more competition, which makes sense. We’re kind of in that phase heading up to two, getting more and more supply. So if we continue to get more supply over the next few months, that’s typically why one of the reasons that the summer is a little bit slower here in the Seattle area. Now I want to do something new here. I want to share some data that I’ve been trying out in my weekly videos and I want to share some more specific data for Seattle, and we’ll talk about Bellevue here too briefly so you can compare.

But I’m able to pull the last week of data for Seattle. Now it’s anonymous, so I don’t know exactly which listings or what areas, but I can look at Seattle and I can say, Hey, we’ve got our median sales price over the last week. It hasn’t closed yet, so these are houses under contract. These numbers are going to change. 964,000 was the median sales price over the past week in Seattle. That’s pretty cool. The average percentage of list price was right at asking price, and we were talking about that, that we’re a little bit over for the month of February, but maybe things might slow down. So a little bit less than what the numbers were for the month of February. Looking at Seattle, we saw 33% of homes sold with multiple offers. That’s a pretty healthy number of sales pending inspection. So some people will go and proceed without an inspection contingency.

A little bit of a risky strategy. In this case, 45% of buyers wanted an inspection or included that in their offer, 55% did not in Seattle. So just thinking about the competition when you can typically buyers do and when it’s a little more competitive, that’s where they might remove that contingency. Sometimes sellers are providing those reports now, which is nice, but not necessarily reliable either. So there’s pros and cons to accepting or utilizing the seller’s inspection versus just getting your own inspection. Every inspector sees things a little bit differently. Financing addendums included an offer 57% in Seattle. That means almost half of the buyers did not either get a loan or they didn’t include a contingency for their loan. So they’re willing to risk not getting the house and their earnest money associated with it and the inspections, that one is going to potentially cost you money down the road, right?

Whereas the financing addendum is only really that important if you need to get out of the contract because of your financing situation. Or maybe it doesn’t appraise, and that’s a problem for you as well. I think nobody wants to overpay for a house, right? So the appraisal is a very valuable tool. I’m seeing less and less where an appraisal is even part of the deal. It’s interesting, we’re seeing more and more automated appraisals where depending on how much you’re putting down or where you’re buying, the computers are saying, eh, we don’t need an appraisal. And at the end of the day, the appraisal is for the lender, not for the buyer. Even though the buyer wants to know what the info is. The reason you’re getting an appraisal as part of your financing is because the lender wants it to make sure they’re not overextending themselves with a loan.

Now, the escalation addendums, this is interesting. 18% of buyers in Seattle included an escalation addendum, meaning they were offering to pay more than what their initial offer was, depending on how other buyers reacted. And it’s probably safe to say that there were at least that many multiple offer situations where home sold over asking or at least could have. But at the same time, if there were more multiple offer scenarios, maybe some just went ahead and offered more without that escalation addendum. So that’s Seattle. Now let’s take a look at Bellevue. Let’s look at Bellevue’s data here. Now, median sales price last week, 1,978,500. So more than the average for February. If we’re looking at that data and we’re seeing houses on average selling at asking price in Bellevue, it looks like today 3% over. So again, this is just a week long snapshot. So some days a little bit more, some days less.

But the last week at asking price, on average, we’re seeing multiple offers. So we’re seeing 56% of sales with multiple offers. This is a very high percentage. This is more than Seattle considerably. The pendings with an inspection addendum, 11%, that means a ton of people are removing that contingency or they are inspecting the house or the seller provided a pre-inspection, but in some way they’re trying to get rid of that contingency because it’s so competitive. And with this many multiple offer scenarios, it makes sense. These buyers are also paying a lot more for their house. Maybe they can afford to take that risk of not having the inspection, but still, 11% is a small number. 89% of people in Bellevue buying in Bellevue said, you know what? No addendum. That’s crazy. But that means it’s a lot more competitive than what we’ve been seeing in Seattle pendings with the financing addendum.

Also super low. Only 28% of buyers used the financing addendum in Bellevue. The majority of those buyers probably still included financing, but they just said, Hey, I’m willing to risk it. And the pendings with the escalation addendum, 22% doesn’t match up as well as some of these numbers, which are pretty dramatically skewed towards this multiple offer scenario. So I’m going to venture to say that there were quite a bit more that sold over asking price than this 22%, but 22% of people at least utilized the escalation addendum as part of their offer strategy. Essentially, it’s a silent bid form. You say, Hey, I’m willing to pay this much more than a competing buyer all the way up to whatever this number is. And it’s kind of a blind bid at that point with your top number on there. Now, looking at these numbers, it’s certainly a lot more competitive than Seattle over in Bellevue, and I would say that that was the case for a lot of the more desirable east side neighborhoods.

But it’s fascinating to see, even without the multiple offer scenarios, how many people are still not including those financing or inspection addendums. They’re not the same numbers. You’re seeing people that are maybe cash buyers, yes, but also buyers that maybe are removing those anyway, and maybe they’re just paying, asking price or just a little bit less than asking price. The buyers that are willing to be a little bit more aggressive on their terms in the offer, and maybe not as aggressive on the price, but we’re still seeing, as we saw earlier, houses selling over the asking price. So overall, Seattle and Bellevue’s housing markets are picking up. King County is a competitive housing market to buy in. Seattle and Bellevue are some of the more competitive places to buy. There are certainly other neighborhoods near and around Bellevue that are more competitive to buy in, but there are also plenty of places for buyers to pay quite a bit less and have some less competition. So if you made it all the way to the end here, I know that this was valuable for you, so please consider subscribing to the channel for more videos like this. And of course, if there’s any way I can help you bring value to your situation, whether that’s a buyer meeting consultation or a listing sales consultation, I’d love to be a resource for you.