Seattle Real Estate Market Update | August 2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market update for August, 2024.

Welcome, if you’re new, we’re going to start off with a client story. We’re going to talk about some housing market stats, and at the end of this video we’re going to talk about what this means for you if you’re thinking about buying, selling, or investing in real estate here in Seattle this month. I want to talk about the Shoreline housing market as we do our client story, and I’ll share it with a listing in a purchase. And I had a client make a purchase after selling in the same month. So I think it’s a good little snapshot of what’s been going on in the Shoreline housing market specifically. Now, the sale, we had lots of traffic through the listing, multiple buyers that were circling around considering an offer, but in this case, we only had one offer on the house. The offer was great. It was at asking price, there were contingencies removed, the buyer was paying cash.

It was amazing, but it wasn’t a multiple offer situation. The house wasn’t selling way over asking price. This same client made a purchase closing today, which is kind of fun in Shoreline, a little bit farther away on the other side of the freeway, kind of over by Richmond Beach area. And in this instance, the house ended up selling below asking price, so we were able to negotiate the price down. It had been on the market for a couple weeks and we also were able to negotiate some concessions after the home inspection. But this particular negotiation was a lot of back and forth. It wasn’t a make your highest and best, leave it all on the table, wave everything, pay way over asking price. We were actually able to have a conversation and a dialogue and come to a price that made sense for both parties.

It was a true negotiation. I guess they’re all negotiations, but we didn’t have to give away everything in order to make it happen. And I think that’s what’s been changing here over the summer. It’s typical to see that in the Seattle housing market that in the summer things start to slow down a little bit. We start to see things stabilize a little bit as we have more listings coming on the market. And that’s what’s been happening here recently. We’ve been seeing more houses coming on the market in Seattle and in Bellevue and across all of King and Snohomish County, which is helping for some of that competition to cool down. There’s just enough houses or at least more houses for everybody to choose from. That doesn’t mean that some houses aren’t still selling over asking price. In fact, according to our data this month, we’re actually seeing houses selling for over asking price on average in Seattle and also in Bellevue.

And to be specific, 1.1% above asking in Seattle on average, 2.3% above in Bellevue. So we’re still seeing stuff selling above asking price, but there are plenty of houses right now that are not receiving multiple offers and not selling over asking price. Now, let’s talk about the median sales price because we’ve talked for months about how the housing market here has been recovering from when the interest rates started to balloon and people were panicking. Home prices are almost back to where they were. They’re not there yet, but they’ve been recovering in 2024 and mortgage rates haven’t really gotten that much better. They are better. Today we’re sitting at 6.54% according to Mortgage News Daily’s daily survey. And this is encouraging because rates have been hovering closer to seven and even over seven for much of 2024 so far. I think there’s also hope now, real hope that we’re going to start to see some rate cuts.

Inflation seems to be at least below what was expected. And yeah, maybe we are going to see some cuts here soon. That’s what’s being hinted at least. And that would I think, stimulate the housing market here in Seattle specifically as we are, I would argue, a more rate sensitive market than others. With the higher prices. Now, median sales price in Seattle last month, 9 54, 6 0.7% above last year, that’s a pretty good healthy amount. We’ve seen prices more than level off. I would say here, over the past three months or so, we haven’t seen much of a dip and we also haven’t seen much of a climb. Bellevue’s median sales price last month was 1,810,000 or down 1.5% from last year. Bellevue’s price has kind of been bumpy. There’s a lot less sales in Bellevue. So I would argue that prices have fairly leveled off in Bellevue as well.

If we look at a three, four month average, things haven’t started dipping much or going up for that matter. Now, closed sales, we had more closed sales here in Seattle last month, 12.9% up from last year Bellevue, 26.4% more closed sales than we saw last year. Still not quite as many in Seattle as a couple years back, even when the market was slowing down and considerably less than when the market was hotter in both cases. Now, how quickly are home selling, right? That’s a question that is asked of me by buyers regularly. Sellers are also curious, how long is it going to take to sell my house? And you’re looking at about a week is the median, the average is longer. We’re seeing houses take about 18 days in Seattle, 17 in Bellevue on average. So again, that means some houses are sitting here as outliers.

There aren’t as many outliers on the lower end because of offer review dates. Those are pretty right now where sellers are requesting offers on a specific date, usually five to seven days after listing, hoping maybe for multiple offers in a little bit of a bidding war. As we mentioned, that’s not as common right now, but still in play. But we’re looking at about seven to 14 days, seven to 20 days depending on which number you want to look at, average or median. And then we just talked about this, that houses are selling on average over asking price in Seattle and in Bellevue, and that is the case in King and Snohomish County across the board. If you want to check out that information a little bit more specifically, maybe you’re looking at Snohomish County or King County, I do updates on those counties as well.

So we can look at specific county data. And even if you want to get more granular about specific cities that I don’t talk about in these videos on a regular basis, I’m happy to dialogue about those markets to in specific, I just don’t have the time to make a video update for every single city in King in Snohomish County, which is why we end up with the more broad video for those purposes. Now, let’s look at new listings because one of the big, I guess, themes from last year, so we didn’t have nearly as many listings as we had in previous years and it was considerably less. And we have seen an uptick Seattle 29.2% more new listings this year than we saw last year. Bellevue’s about the same. I would say it was a little less dramatic in Bellevue than it was in Seattle, but we’re still about 25% down from the previous three, four years.

And in a 10, 15 year snapshot, still pretty well below what we would normally see as far as new listings, but it’s encouraging to see that the listing inventory is picking up, more listings are coming on the market. It’s really needed to be honest, that was last year. I would say one of the big reasons that prices didn’t drop as much as some people thought was because we didn’t have enough listings. Now we’re seeing more listings coming on the market and the buyer activities picking up. We’re seeing more pending sales, 6.3% more pending sales in Seattle and 4.8% more in Bellevue. So there’s more buyer activity keeping up with the new listings coming on the market. But we’re also seeing as a result, more new listings right than buyers. And so we’re seeing that homes for sale is increasing. We’ve got almost 50% more homes for sale in Seattle this year than last year.

Not more than a normal year, but more than last year. And Bellevue, about 1.6% up from last year, a little bit below what I would say would be a normal amount of homes for sale in Bellevue. And all of this just puts pressure on prices, right? More homes for sale equals less competition, more options for buyers, and less likelihood for multiple offers. Same thing in Bellevue, right? It’s across the board. Now, if we look at the supply though, I mentioned how Bellevue has had less of that increase. Seattle has about two and a half months of supply for homes. So that’s, if we didn’t list a new home for two and a half months in Seattle, there’d still be a home for every buyer. Bellevue, 1.6 months, considerably less supply. In both cases, we’re still in what we would call a seller’s market, but I would say it’s getting more towards a neutral market in Seattle, which is why you’re seeing less of the asking price in Seattle.

Bellevue is still in a lower inventory environment, more of a seller’s market still, and a lot of the east side is in a similar place to Bellevue. And I talk about Bellevue as an example of what the east side market looks like. It’s the big city on the east side, Seattle being the big city on the west side. And as we’re looking at what the rest of 20, 24 looks like, a little bit of application, right? For sellers, typically as we approach the holidays, so once we start getting into November, December, things slow down a lot. There are quite a bit fewer listings. It’s usually people that need to sell. And if interest rates do start coming down, I would almost argue that it might be pretty competitive. And I’ve seen this in a few other years here in recent years where it gets more competitive during the holidays because there’s not a lot of houses and rates are down and buyers are jumping into the market.

But as we exit the summer, we’re going to be in this place where we have more supply. So right now we have more houses available, and as we enter into the fall and we get farther into the fall, if you’re a buyer specifically, I think you’re going to find it to be a lot harder to buy. There’s going to not be as many houses available. Last year was super, super low this year might not be quite as low, but we’re not going to have as many houses available and rates are likely going to be dropping. At least that’s the prediction. And so if you find yourself in that situation, it’s going to be more competitive. Lower rates equals more buyers able to afford houses and less houses equals more competition. So the fall, later in the fall and into the winter, I would expect this year is going to be fairly competitive in the Seattle and Bellevue area, the east side and the west side here.

If you’re a seller, you are right now, you have the prime weather, it’s amazing. Listing your house is great. I think you are going to experience a quicker sale as we’re seeing here. And I also think that you’ve got enough buyers in the market. I think come fall and winter, specifically winter, it may get a little bit more competitive. Prices do typically trail off a little bit into the fall and the winter, so it’s, in my opinion, usually better to list earlier if you can because of the weather. And there are the most of buyers going to be looking right now. I don’t think, and this is going to go for both buyers and sellers, that we’re going to see crazy multiple offer scenarios in the fall and in the winter. But I do think that it will be a lot harder for buyers, especially because there will be less options available.

And for me as a buyer, I don’t want to just buy a house and just because it’s a good investment, I want something that I’m going to enjoy. And so I almost think that this advice is more for buyers right now than for sellers. I think sellers, you’re going to be in a seller’s market whether you sell now or you sell a little bit later in the year. And I would argue that historically speaking, the fall and late summer is usually a little bit better maybe than the winter for a seller, unless you’re on the other side of the new year, going in to 2025, maybe late January, early February. That time of the winter is sometimes okay as well with super, super low inventory. But those are my thoughts for today. I think we are heading into Q4 here soon. Wrapping up Q3. And we are, man, we have seen a lot of rebound and recovery here in the housing market.

I think as we head towards 2025, we turn the page into the new year. We have a new president. We are past the election. I think we’re going to see that the housing market is going to start opening up, and I expect for January, February, March to be the springboard for a really hot housing market here in 2025. The proof’s in the pudding. Time will tell. I don’t have a crystal ball, but those are my thoughts here as we head towards the fall and into 2025. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Seattle real Estate market update. If you made it all the way to the end, I know you got some value out of this, so please consider subscribing to the channel so you can follow along on a regular basis. And as always, if you’re watching this and there’s some way I can bring value to your home search or sale, I’d love to be a resource for you.