Seattle Real Estate Market Update | October 2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate market update for October, 2024. Welcome back to another month here, and we’re going to look at the stats over the last month from the Northwest multiple listing service in Seattle and also Bellevue. Bellevue’s been a new addition here over the past couple years. And before we jump into the stats and how they apply to you as a home buyer or seller, or even just somebody paying attention to the Seattle market, I want to share a client story, which is something I’ve done traditionally in these videos and I feel like I’ve been a little bit bad about that recently. But I had a fun opportunity recently to help a client sell a house they’re living out of state. It’s an estate sale, so they had a relative, their father passed away and I got to help them sell their house in Everett.

And I think what’s fun about this process is my mom does estate sales and cleanouts of houses, and so sometimes we get to work together. And in this case, she was the person that had connected with this client and referred them to me. So I got to essentially take over when she finished with her part of the process. And then we got the house ready for sale, staged it, got it on the market and sold relatively quickly. This one was one of the few recently that have sold super quick, which is always nice for the client. But I think it was fun for a few different reasons. Number one, getting to work with my mom on this one, but also I think it’s fun to have more of the project management or getting a house ready to go on the market. Sometimes clients have their houses perfect, there’s not as much to do, but recently it seems like some of our listings, we’ve been able to bring a lot of value on that front as well.

So let’s transition now to talking about the stats, and as we do that, I want to talk about mortgage rates here real quick because mortgage rates have been going up over the past few weeks, not down as many might’ve thought would happen as we saw the fed rate cut a half percent. In fact, mortgage rates are up about a half percent in the same time over the last month or so. And rates, if you’ve been following for a while, have been trending downwards for a while this year, and we saw rates get into the real upper fives briefly and then come back into the low sixes. They’ve been trending up. So mortgage news daily’s survey here is saying 6.62% is the rate for mortgage, and that is considerably lower than the low to mid sevens and way lower than the low eights like we saw last year.

But still 6.62% is a relatively high rate given the price environment that we’re at here in the Seattle area. So one thing I’ve noticed here recently is it has been slowing down a little bit, I would say, especially since the Fed announcement, whereas many would’ve thought that would’ve been the kind of impetus for an increase in activity. What we actually saw was that activity was picking up beforehand in anticipation of that, and also that the rates had been pulling back. And now that we got the announcement, we’ve heard the news, maybe this isn’t going to happen as often here as maybe somewhat of expected. We’ve also had some other economic data come out. We’ve had some bombings happening. I mean there’s all sorts of stuff. We have a hurricane happening as we look at the markets, they’re very, very volatile, right? And the mortgage rates are no different than that.

So we’ve been seeing rates trending up, not down. And that does affect the housing market. It does affect buyer’s ability to make a purchase, but at the same time, those rates are lower. It’s lower than what I got last year when I bought my house, and I still haven’t refinanced, which I’m hoping to do at some point into a lower rate, but right now I have a 7% rate and it’s not really worth going through a refinance to save a little bit there. The amount of time and also the money to do that, it’s not really worth it. So I’m going to keep holding on a little bit longer on that refinance. Now as we look at prices in Bellevue and Seattle, something to note, although we are not back to our all time highs, the September median sales price in Seattle and Bellevue is the highest September median sales price ever.

Bellevue by $5,000. Seattle by a little bit more, but looking back to 2021, which would’ve been a higher point in theory, potentially Bellevue was just a tad higher. Seattle, considerably higher actually. And in both cases they have new records. So record high prices in Seattle and Bellevue in September, which is not meant to be some type of woo the market’s back, but it has been recovering and we have never seen prices this high in September ever before. So interesting news, and I figured I would share that because as I’m looking at the data first I was a little surprised to see that, but it makes sense that as the market’s been recovering, we did see that there was a really big spike in 2022 for about six months as people were thinking rates might be going up, so I need to buy now. And also the super low inventory, both of those contributed to some pretty drastic amounts paid over asking price, and that pushed prices up a lot, at least in that little window.

But we’re now getting back into the groove, so to speak, and seeing more normal appreciation numbers, and we’re seeing now the highest price ever in September. Now closed sales activity was down year over year, about 2.5% in Seattle, about the same as last year in Bellevue. And these are declining and have been declining over the past couple of years for September, and these sales would’ve been from August. So the September closings would’ve been August pendings, right? And it’s October. So just keep in mind as we’re talking about this that things have been adapting and that’s why I do the weekly market watches on the weeks where we’re not doing this video so that you can know, okay, what’s going on in between? What’s going on in the middle, what’s maybe changing or on the way to changing even though the data is showing us this one thing.

Median days on market in September was a little bit up in Seattle, a little down in Bellevue, but 11 days in Seattle, six in Bellevue, year over year, the average days on market quite a bit higher, 25 days in Seattle and 14 in Bellevue. Both of those are going to be quite a bit higher than they were in the hottest part of the market. But again, still relatively quick days on market that’s not that long to sell your house. Let’s talk about competition in the market because recently in a few different Seattle neighborhoods, I’ve experienced multiple offers and prices going up considerably. And it’s clearly not every single house and it’s clearly not every single neighborhood. So as we’re looking at the Seattle median sales price, we’re seeing those numbers up modestly. We’re seeing it taking a little bit of time to sell. And if we look at the percentage over list price, we’re seeing only 0.6% above asking price is the average in Seattle and in Bellevue, 1.5%.

So there are some homes and in certain pockets where we are seeing a lot of competition and we always do, but they’re relatively exclusive and there aren’t a lot of opportunities. And so when they come up, people are eating them up. But when we look at Seattle and Bellevue as a whole, that’s not necessarily the case. There are plenty of opportunities to make a purchase that aren’t going to be as competitive right now. If you look at that listing activity, I think this is a huge piece of why we’re seeing things slowing down a tad right now, and that is because we’re seeing more houses coming on the market. We have 25.4% jump in Seattle. Bellevue has remained about the same, only 1.7% jump, but pretty substantial from the previous year. And we’re not quite to the new listing numbers that we were seeing in hotter markets, but we’re not super far off either.

So we’re starting to see a return to normal, which is something we talked about in the predictions video at the beginning of the year last year, 2023 was super, super down year for new listings and sales. And so seeing a little bit more of a return to the normal in 2024, although prices aren’t quite back as we’ve been talking about, pending sales activity though is picking up considerably. So Seattle saw a 37.1% jump in pending sales activity, which is going to be a little bit more of a realistic look at how the market’s doing in this month in October because all these are going to be closing in October. So when we look back at the stats from October, a lot of the pending sales in Seattle will be closing in October from September. If we look at Bellevue, we’re seeing a little uptick there as well.

6.3% Bellevue’s numbers aren’t as dramatically different than they were last year. Seattle is seeing a little bit more of an adjustment there now as we’re looking at the homes for sale number as well. Seattle is seeing more of an inflation in the inventory numbers. So Seattle is seeing 38.8% more homes for sale, whereas Bellevue is seeing a decline of 10.2%, and that is affecting the amount of homes that are sitting on the market. So we have 36.8% more inventory at the end of the month, or supply 2.6 months of supply, which is a pretty big jump from last year and has been a big jump from where we were in previous months. We’ve been seeing this number increasing pretty dramatically over the past few months in Seattle Bellevue, 1.7 months of supply down a little bit from last year, still pretty high highest point of the year so far in Bellevue.

In both cases, you’re seeing more time on market, you’re seeing buyers have a little bit more options, and that is a big reason for the time on the market as well as a little bit less pressure on prices. Now, Seattle 2.6 months is getting high, it’s getting a little bit more towards that buyer’s market, but as we’re talking about, there’s still some cases where you’re paying more and competing, but there are also others where it’s not as competitive and maybe a house is sitting on the market for a little bit and you have opportunities to make a purchase. So a lot of it comes down to the location and also what type of house you are looking for. And as we head into the rest of the fall and the winter, we are going to see a dramatic drop off in listings every year. It slows down a lot.

We’re heading into the slowest months of the year for listing activity. And buyer activity will slow down too, but it doesn’t slow down as much. And so what is going to happen is a lot of the houses that are for sale right now, the most amount of houses all year for sale, this is your chance. If you’re a buyer to have as many options as you want and potentially negotiate prices and not be paying the peak prices for the year, this is your chance. What’s going to happen is these listings are going to sell and there won’t be that many listings available. And then as new people start looking or people start looking again, took a break when maybe they had the most opportunity for success, now all of a sudden it’s going to be a lot more competitive for the very few listings that are available.

And this happens every year. It’s a cycle that happens regardless of the market. Even in the last couple years we’ve seen this same cycle. It’s been a little more exaggerated, but we have seen a hotter spring market, slower fall market every year we see it. And so we are heading towards that right now. If interest rates would’ve dropped more and the economic data would’ve been different, yeah, maybe we’d be seeing a more competitive end of the year. And that’s something that I talked about was thinking maybe we would see a little bit more activity if rates got below six and even into the mid fives. And in this case, really we’ve been dancing with it but not, we’re not getting there. And I don’t think we are going to get there in 2024. And if that’s the case, then we are going to see a pretty normal fall and winter market. So questions if you have them, please reach out, drop ’em in the comments. I’m happy to have a conversation too if you have more personalized questions for your situation. And of course, if you’re looking to buy or sell a house here in the Seattle metro area, I’d love to be a resource for you.