Seattle Real Estate Market Update | September 2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate market update for September, 2024. Well, the biggest news as of late are the interest rates and the interest rates have been declining for the last month or so, and we’re seeing rates now getting close to 6% and in some cases even below 6%, depending on the loan type. And for the past few years, mortgage rates have been, headlines have caused the housing market to slow down in some sense, and now we’re seeing rates coming down and there are signs that things are picking up. Even looking back at last month, last month when I filmed this same video, the August market update, we had mortgage rates at 6.54% on mortgage news dailies daily survey. What we’re currently seeing is right around 6% for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage.

And that changes things when people are looking at purchasing a house. It affects their budget how much they can afford. They were looking at over 7% rate at the same time last year, their purchasing power was significantly less and their payments were a lot more. And so now we’re starting to see a little bit the effects of the lower rates. And when I say that, I’ll share a story from yesterday. So I had some buyers, I have some clients that are looking to purchase in the Queen Anne Ballard area, and we’ve worked together before, and they have a knack for getting started with their home search before things start to heat up. And the first time we worked together, they bought when there was a little bit of a lull and when had some conversations a few years back when the market had slowed down.

And for multiple reasons it didn’t make sense to make the move then. But now we’re starting to look again. And as we made an offer yesterday on this house in Ballard, the house was great. And there’ve been a few sales in there recently where we saw it sell over asking price. But this one was a little bit surprising in the sense that the majority of the houses in this particular area maybe were selling just over asking price. There had been a few more recently where we’d seen a little more competition. This particular house ended up getting nine offers and it sold for 250,000 over the asking price, no contingencies. It felt a lot like the old days. And when I say the old days, I’m just talking about before the market slowed down back in 2022. And these clients in particular, they made a great offer, but at the end of the day we got beat pretty significantly on the price.

And ultimately when you’re competing in multiple offer scenario, you have your walkaway point. That’s what we talk about, that you are going to tip your hat essentially to the other buyers. And for them, they had no interest in paying the purchase price that this house went for. But at the same time, I think this house in particular was a little bit of a display of how things have started to shift. And there was another house in Queen Anne yesterday that we were considering, and that one also sold considerably over asking price and had multiple offers. Seattle itself is starting to get a little bit more competitive than it was even a few months back. And I think a lot of that has to do with interest rates and buyers being interested. I also think people maybe that are coming back into the office are starting to think a little bit more about proximity to work versus the work from home scenario.

If you have to drive from some of the suburbs around Seattle like Linwood or Bothell or even farther north, those drives can be considerably longer when there’s traffic. And so it makes sense sometimes to be closer to the office. Now, I also had some listings reviewing offers yesterday and some different places around the city and some of the other suburbs. And I wouldn’t say it was a surprise because we haven’t been seeing multiple offers on every house, but a few of them did not receive offers on their offer review dates. So it’s not that every single house is getting this multiple offer frenzy, and in fact they were in different areas. It’s kind of interesting to see how the different pockets of the market are responding. A couple different Seattle neighborhoods that are more desirable, getting the multiple offers and seeing the prices going up.

Also updated houses fully remodeled, right? Really great move-in ready condition. And then a few of the listings, one of them that I have in Bothell, just beautiful house, beautiful house, really nicely updated as well from even what it was a few years back. I think it’s going to sell quickly, but we didn’t get multiple offers. We didn’t get one offer on it. So if you’re looking for a house in Bothell, that one’s still available. And then we had a listing in Linwood where we had the seller wanted to essentially bring it back to its original condition. It was a 1980s house, so it’s got new carpet and paint, but it looks like it’s a 1980s house on the inside. And that one, I think, again, I think that’ll sell relatively quick, but it didn’t get that same frenzy. And then a listing up in Lake Stevens, that one went pending, which is awesome for those clients.

We got a solid offer. And then there’s also another listing that we were looking at offers in Edmonds, and this one had some pretty good traffic through, but no offers as well. So again, different pockets, different types of houses, right? Sometimes the house itself is something maybe unique or different. Sometimes it’s the market in a specific area, but we’re selling houses all over the region, so we like to talk about these different markets and pockets as well as not just only Seattle itself here on the channel. And hopefully that gives a little bit of a snapshot of what’s going on in the market, at least from an experiential standpoint. A little different than the other market updates that I’ve done. But let’s talk about some of the stats too, because many of you are tuning in here for the stats, not just for the anecdotal thoughts of mine.

As you’re listening and looking at the rates, I think rates have a huge effect on what’s going on in the housing market as far as the activity level, but we’re looking at median sales price here and in Seattle, home prices year over year are up 4.5%. So median sales price 9 25 this past month, it was a little bit higher last month. Last month we were at 9 45. It’s typical to see a little bit of a drop off in the end of the summer here. And even into the fall, there’s kind of a cyclical seasonal flow to the housing prices, at least as far as the median sales prices go. Bellevue, looking at Bellevue’s median sales price actually up month over month and also up 14.6% year over year. So a little bit of a nice little snapshot there for Bellevue. And interestingly, significantly higher than back in 2022.

So Bellevue’s median sales price back in 20 22, 1 0.6 million, and this year, 1.8775 was a median sales price in Bellevue, significantly higher than it was not just last year, but back in 2022 when the market had slowed down a little bit. Closed sales have slowed down. Seattle down 11.2% year over year. Bellevue down 5.4% year over year, median days on market are up. This is tough, right? Because looking at it, it’s 14.3% up, 16.7% up, but really we’re talking about eight, seven days on the market. Things are selling relatively quickly. If we’re looking at the median now, the average is quite a bit higher. So there are many houses that are not selling immediately, right? There are some that are selling quickly, some that are taking longer. And I don’t want to say it’s a toss up, it’s not a toss up. Certain houses are going to always sell faster, but sometimes houses are priced on the higher side.

So there’s a lot of variables, but it’s not like every single house is just selling immediately right now. In fact, Seattle, 20 days on market, Bellevue, 23 days on market. If we’re looking at average numbers. Now, if you’re to make an offer, what should you expect when you’re making an offer? Are you going to be getting the asking price? Are you negotiating down? What’s the deal here? That’s a question that I get asked regularly from buyers in a hot market in a slow market. Right now, we’re looking at over asking price. In both cases, I would say in most of King and Snohomish County are looking at paying over asking price on average for a house. So there are certain houses that are selling below, asking price houses that have sat on the market for a little bit. And there’s also houses that like I just shared, that are selling for considerably over the asking price.

So Seattle, 1.1% above asking price. Bellevue 1.3. And again, this is just an average across the whole city. So certain neighborhoods and pockets are going to have more competition than others. And then if we’re looking at the suburbs as a whole, those markets are also different. But for Seattle and Bellevue, we’re looking at an average of 1.1 and 1.3% above the asking price listings. Listing activity has picked up in Seattle as far as year over year. Numbers go Bellevue down slightly on the year over year, new listing numbers. Now if we look at last month, we’re down in Seattle by a lot of new listings. Things have slowed down as far as listing activity in Seattle. We had 815 new listings two months ago, 644 this past month. Pending sales are up year over year and down slightly month over month in Seattle. And the opposite inverse in Bellevue, but still not a lot of pending sales.

If we’re looking back at historical numbers and historical averages, we have trended down over the past few years. We’re up from last year, which was a very slow year, a lot of people holding onto their houses, and that’s still the case for the most part. There are a lot of people with really low interest rates right now that have no desire to sell here in the Seattle area. And I would say that’s a big reason why the housing market hasn’t been worse with the higher rates than it could have been. It has slowed down and it has been picking up considerably over the past year or so, but I think it would’ve been a lot worse with these higher rates if it wasn’t for a supply issue. There really haven’t been a lot of houses coming available, and there’s still been enough buyer demand to keep things relatively stable in the housing market.

Now, inventory has been picking up. We are at 2.3 months of supply in Seattle. We’re at 1.5 months of supply in Bellevue. And what we know is when the housing market supply picks up, there is less demand or pressure on the existing inventory, which is when we see houses not selling for crazy numbers over asking price, maybe even below asking price. And we’re seeing this month versus last month a actual slowdown in the supply. So the supply has been decreasing over the past month, over the previous few we’d been seeing it building up, and now we’re starting to see it coming down a little bit. And this is the time of year, September, October, November, where we see the houses that are out there start to disappear as people start to make decisions. Well, I want to buy, this is what’s out here, and I’m going to go ahead and buy this house maybe for a little bit less.

We don’t see as many new listings this time of year as we do during the summer. So typically things start to go the opposite direction into the winter, and then we start to have a lower inventory environment. So I would expect over these next few months, even weeks, to start to see these numbers dwindling. We will likely have a little bump in the amount of new listings here, maybe the next two, three weeks, and then it will start to get a lot slower, and that’s when I would expect it to start to get a little bit more competitive again in the market. What’s interesting is we’re looking at mortgage rates on a decline, and I think a lot of the fed conversation around dropping rates is already baked into those mortgage rates at this point. But at the same time, if rates do keep coming down on mortgages and we’re seeing that housing supplied dueling, we’re going to have two different factors working in the seller’s favor, not the buyer’s favor.

We’ll have less to choose from, better rates, which means more buyers are most likely going to be purchasing. And at that case now, we not only have more buyers because of rates, but we also have less houses to choose from too. So you have two things working against the buyers, which was going to create more competition for those houses that are available. So this fall may be a pretty competitive housing market. It may also be a relatively normal fall and winter. I think a lot of it comes down to how much more the rates go down. And if there isn’t a lot of swapping, people may be buying a house and then selling that sometimes keeps things a little bit more interesting too. But overall, the expectation or the hope I think, by many is that mortgage rates are going to start coming down and they already have, but even more so as a result of some of the Fed conversations if they do decide to drop the rate.

I also think that presidential election has something to do here, but I’ve also shared that historically speaking, data doesn’t support presidential elections having a massive effect on the housing market, aside from maybe just little short blips as people are maybe sitting on the sidelines or pausing for a month or two. So if you have questions though about buying or selling here in Seattle, I’d love to be a resource for you. I make these videos to bring value and information, but every single person situation is a little bit different. I get asked regularly, when’s the best time to buy a house? Is now the time or should I wait? And a lot of that is situational, depending on the person, and sometimes it has to do with the market conditions as well. So again, if you have questions and I can bring some value, please feel free to reach out. And of course, if you haven’t subscribed yet and you want to follow along on a regular basis, please do.