Seattle Real Estate Market Update | July 2024

Hey y’all, it’s Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate market update for July, 2024.

What’s up Seattle? Happy Summer. Happy fourth. It is getting beautiful here, and this is interestingly one of the times of the year where Christina and I every year go, we would never, ever leave Seattle. It’s so beautiful here. Is there anywhere else in the entire us, in the entire world that we’d want to live? And we say things like, Nope, never. Why would we ever think about it? But a few months ago, we might’ve been thinking, oh, where could we go where it’s a little sunnier and a little bit warmer, but this is the time of the year where everybody loves being in Seattle and enjoying the outdoors. Speaking of the outdoors, I just got to summit Mount Rainier here in the last couple days and that was a big goal of mine. And now when I look at that mountain, I can be like, yes, I did that.

But not everybody’s goal is to summit Mount Rainier. There are a lot of other things that people enjoy doing here in the Seattle area during the summertime, and that is why things tend to slow down when you think maybe they would pick up when the weather gets nicer. Now, client story I want to share is a client of mine named Nick. He bought his first house kind of on the border of Mill Creek, Snohomish Everett. I wouldn’t say it’s no man’s land, but kind of on the border there. And the house had multiple offers. There were five offers on this house, but only one of them, his was just a little bit over the asking price, so he ended up getting it just over asking price. The thing that I think is important to reiterate here is that although he did get it for right around the asking price, he did have to remove contingencies or be really competitive with his offer.

So the contingencies are protections for him in the contract. And he had a financing contingency that he removed. Risky, right? Inspection, contingency removed, risky. We did have a pre-inspection report that we were able to look at. It wasn’t our inspector, his inspector, but he was confident in the inspection report that was provided. It’s just a crazy world where even when you have a house that you’re getting it at asking price, you’re still five offers, right? And that’s a trend I’ve seen. I had another listing that had one winner, but we had a couple offers and they were right at or just above asking price. There wasn’t a clear winner, right? It was really hard to choose between the offers. And I think that’s what happened here on this Snohomish house as well, that the seller had to pick based on something aside from, Hey, this offer is so much better than the other ones.

I think a couple of them were very similar to ours. We were the first one in and we got a chance to maybe put a little bit more money down on the table to get it across the finish line. So I think it’s important to know that as a buyer, even though it seems that things are selling for asking price or maybe even a little less, it’s still not a market where you just make an offer and it gets accepted. It’s still competitive. And some of the stuff you can’t see behind the scenes are things like removed contingencies in the contract. Now, what’s going on with mortgage rates? We’ve been talking about mortgage rates way more on these updates than we used to. And I think the biggest reason is because they are affecting the prices and the competition quite a bit, especially in the Seattle and other higher marketplaces.

We’re seeing interest rates still hovering around 7% according to mortgage news dailies survey. We’ve been seeing stuff going lower into the maybe six and a half range, seven and a half range, but the last, I don’t know, month, month and a half, we’ve really been consistently right around 7% for the mortgage rates. And even with those higher rates, we’ve been seeing that prices have been climbing and Seattle and in Bellevue across the water, and really King Snohomish County in general, the whole Seattle area. Now Seattle is slowing down a little bit and so is Bellevue. We’ve seen the median sales price drop down a little tiny bit month over month. And we also saw that the median sales price of 9 33 500 is only 2.3% above last year. So although King County had a larger jump above the median sales price overall, Seattle was a little bit below the median for the county Bellevue at 9.3% above the previous year.

1.912 million is above King County’s median sales price. So Bellevue jumped a little bit more than the average, and Seattle was a little bit below the average. In both cases though, things are getting better and looking better than they did last year and even in 2022. So things are picking up. The housing market did slow quite a bit from 2022 to 2024, and we’re getting really close to where things were back then. Again, even with the higher interest rates. Now if we look at closed sales Seattle, we saw a drop off in the closed sales of 15.7%, and Bellevue though is up 30.1%. So things have been in Bellevue, I would say improving a little bit ahead of Seattle. Some of that has to do with it taking such a big hit to first being one of the highest priced, if not the highest priced places in the entire region.

Bellevue being one of the most expensive. Seattle still kind of ride in the median for the county. There are neighborhoods and parts of Seattle that are a lot more expensive, but overall there’s a lot more variety in the housing and the price points than there is in Bellevue and on the east side, which is why we really look at both in these updates. So you can get a glimpse for what houses would cost maybe in the Seattle or the west side, and then over on the east side in Bellevue and some of the other surrounding areas as well. Days on market’s, about the same six days on market in Seattle and in Bellevue. And that is extremely quick. That’s less than a week on the market or usually the typical offer review cycle. We got the average and the median being somewhat close. Average in Seattle is a little higher, 15 days on market.

So you have houses that are pulling up the average more so than in Bellevue at 11 days on market. It’s not exactly the same, right? Back in 2022, there were times where the average and the medium were almost identical. It was just like everything came on the market. And if it wasn’t for an offer review date, then it would’ve sold before that, but it was artificially inflated time on the market, whereas now I would argue that it’s not as much so the case. But there are, for the most part, agents are doing offer review dates for houses in Seattle and Bellevue, not maybe as much on the outskirts or the outlying areas of Snohomish and King County, but in the main kind of prime close into Bellevue and Seattle areas, it’s still fairly common to see those review dates. Now let’s look at asking price versus the sales price, right?

List price to sales price ratio. This is one of those questions that people have frequently, Hey, I see that houses are being listed at X price. Are those the houses I should be looking at, or should I be looking at something different? Should I be looking at houses that are maybe priced below what I want to spend? Or should I be looking at houses above, right, depending on the situation. And right now in Seattle, 2.3% above asking price is the average. And in Bellevue, 3.7% above asking price is the average. Now, some houses we were just talking about sit on the market and those houses would be ones that maybe you could consider offering a little bit less than asking price. It usually takes a few weeks before a seller’s willing to start negotiating on the price in a hotter market. And we are in a relatively hot housing market.

It is not as hot as it was, but I think it’s important for buyers and sellers to know that it is still a hot housing market here in the Seattle area, but 2.3% above asking price is not substantial. But some of those are selling for quite a bit more still and others are selling for below, and that’s where we get the average. So I would consider if I was a buyer looking at houses that were right around what I was hoping to spend or a little bit less, given this scenario, if you want to be the most competitive or targeting houses that have been sitting on the market for a few weeks that are pretty close to where you want to be, that would be my thoughts there. Now, let’s look at what’s coming on the market. We saw more new listings than last year, 17.7% more new listings in Seattle, a little less in Bellevue, 4.6% fewer and both are down from last month.

So we saw a substantial pickup in the new listing activity last month in Seattle, a little bit more in Bellevue, but that both have dropped off in the previous or the past month. And we saw that in King County as well across the board, that there were fewer houses coming on the market and that trend did not dodge Seattle and or Bellevue here. Now pending sales, this is the amount of houses that are coming off the market or getting closer to being sold. And we saw a pickup in Seattle and Bellevue, both of just around 11% more pending sales than the previous year. So even though we’re seeing more houses coming on the market, we’re also seeing more houses coming off the market. In both cases, we saw more pending sales than we did last year at the same time. And that brings us to kind of our final number every single month, and that is the amount of houses available, and that has a huge effect on how competitive things are.

The more houses available, the less competition for the houses that are available. And here in Seattle, we saw a 38.2% jump year over year in houses for sale. So as you could imagine, or at least you would think that it would be a lot easier to buy a house right now than it would’ve been last year, Bellevue, only 1.6% up. Unfortunately, that’s not the case because we also have a lot more buyers. We were just talking about how we’ve seen an uptick in pending sales as well as the uptick in listings. But either way, we’re still seeing that inventory building, right? There are more houses coming on the market right now than buyers, which increases the amount of supply. So Seattle had 2.4 months of supply. Again, this is across the whole city. So certain pockets have more or less supply. Bellevue, 1.6 months of supply.

And what that means here is that it is becoming more balanced. It is not balanced by any means. We were just talking about that, how it is more of a seller’s market still than a buyer’s market. But as a home buyer, there are more opportunities to buy a house without some of the competition now than there was a few months ago as inventory has been building. So where are we headed for the rest of the summer? I would argue that things are going to remain relatively stagnant for the summer unless interest rates start dropping. I don’t anticipate for there to be a big pickup in activity. I would almost think that we might see fewer listings this summer than we’ve been seeing coming on recently. We saw a big push in the spring, and I think some of that was hopeful that we’re going to see interest rates coming down and maybe being able to some of those people maybe being able to refinance a little sooner.

It’s interesting to play the story out and say, oh, well now we’re punting the interest rate drops even farther into the future. The stock market’s going crazy. We’ll see. I’m less hopeful that we’re going to see that interest rate drop this year than I was at the beginning of the year. I tend to defer to people that are a lot smarter than me about those things. And the thought was that we’d see multiple interest rate drops and now maybe none. So election year’s coming up as well. We’ve got the election in November, and that will also potentially affect people’s psychology at least a little bit. But historically, election years really don’t affect the housing market as much as maybe people think from an anecdotal standpoint. So again, we’ll see what happens here as we get closer to the fall. But as far as buying or selling here in Seattle right now, or Bellevue, the housing market is still competitive, but it is getting less competitive right now than it was earlier in the spring. If you have questions about buying or selling in the Seattle Bellevue general area, I’d love to be a resource for you. And if these videos are valuable for you, I’d love to be able to take that and help you apply it to your individual situation. And of course, if you know somebody who could benefit from this content, please consider sharing it with them.