Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | November 2024

Hey, I’ll Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Snohomish County real Estate market update for November, 2024. Well, we just finished up a presidential election every four years we have the, let’s call it privilege of about a year of uncertainty and marketing, and here we are with an answer of who the next president of the United States will be. And it’s interesting to see how that changes things. Even just the fact of having an answer changes things. And over the last week we’ve seen the economy, or at least the stock market responding preemptively. And I’ve even noticed over the past week or so, just more buyers entering the market too, just having the clarity of what’s going to be happening. People have been talking about it quite a bit over the past week. Positive, negative, neutral. Either way, there’s at least an answer, which brings some type of closure to these answers for questions that people have been asking.

And so here we are, beginning of November, 2024, and we’re looking at what’s going to be happening in the housing market here in the Seattle area, in Snohomish County is one of the bigger counties in the state. And when we’re looking at the housing market here, we’re starting to see very similar trends to other Octobers, right? There’s nothing really that stands out to me as unique here, except for maybe the price staying about the same median sales price. So as we look at the listings, the last month we had a little bit of a drop off, which is normal for the listings, but not huge, but significantly more than last year. So that’s been our trend this year. Last year was we’re like 30%, 40% down year over year for new listings and pending sales, et cetera. This year we’ve been seeing the opposite. So hey, we’re 30.7% up on the new listings.

Trend is continuing. In fact, if we look at the entire year, we’ve been about 15% up for new listings. So this month more so than some of the other months, if we look at the pending sales numbers up considerably 32.7% year over year. If we look at last month, it’s about the same. We’re talking about 22 listings different for the pending sales. If you look at the closed sales here, pretty similar again, month over month. If we look at year over year, 9.4% up on the closed sales activity. And that’s interesting because we saw fewer listings coming on, but more closed sales or that number staying more close. And so the result is the supply number, which is our last number that we typically look at here. Shrinking, right? It’s up year over year slightly, but it’s down month over month from 1.8 months of supply to 1.7 months.

And I suspect that that trend is going to continue. That’s a normal fall trend as we’re looking at the housing market here. And if we’re looking at percentage of asking price, it’s about the same. It was 99.9 last month. It was right at asking price here in Snohomish County. So not a lot of price escalations, not as much of the competition. And a big part of that is because of the amount of inventory, there’s more options for all the buyers. Now, that doesn’t mean that some are not selling over asking price, but there are certainly are some selling over asking price, some are selling less. That’s how we’re coming up with this average here. And speaking of averages, the average sales price is up month over month in Snohomish County. 12.8% year over year, month over month looks like we’re about $20,000 up. $890,731 is our average sales price in Snohomish County.

The median is also up year over year and month over month, 11.5% year over year, $799,950 as opposed to 775,000 last month. Now, what does this mean, right? We’re talking about the months of supply. These supply numbers are a little higher than we’ve seen in the most competitive Seattle housing markets, but fairly normal for this time of year. And we’re seeing, as a result, a pretty relatively flat housing market here. But it is interesting to see prices going up as we’re rounding out the year, even with the inventory going down. I think that’s signaling towards what we’ve talked about, how this market gets skinnier as we get less houses on the market. We are positioning for more competitive spring to come with less inventory, having more buyers in the market, fighting over fewer houses to buy. And that’s been, I think this summer, the theme of the summer and early fall is that we’ve had more options, a little less pressure and competition, which is why we’ve seen prices coming down a little off of those highs earlier in the spring, and also some of the competition dying down, and now we’re starting to see, it’s starting to pick back up.

It’s not quite there by any means. We’re still in a relatively uncompetitive market in most places, but I’m seeing competition in other places, I would say in King County more than in Snohomish County at this point. So some quick thoughts as we wrap up the month here and we look for the rest of the year. I think we are going to see fewer and fewer houses coming on the market here in Snohomish County. It’s going to get pretty dramatic over the next couple months. We are going to see that buyers are going to be starting to think about a purchase historically, the November, December timeline is when people are thinking of their New Year’s resolutions, and we’re starting to see more buyer activity start up. A lot of it is, Hey, I’m going to get a jumpstart on my goals or my plans for the next year.

I think there’s also still a lot of hope around interest rates coming down. They haven’t been coming down. By the way, we’re still right around 7% for the 30 year fixed rate mortgage according to Mortgage News Daily’s website. In fact, today it was 7.02 on their survey of some of the top lenders in the country. But if you have questions about your situation, maybe you’re one of those people that’s thinking about getting into the housing market in Snohomish County, I’m happy to be a resource for you. Feel free to reach out and if this video is beneficial to you and you want to follow along on a regular basis, please consider subscribing.