Snohomish County Real Estate Market Update | September 2024

Hey, I’m Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Snohomish County Real Estate Market update for September, 2024. Alright, Snohomish County, it’s your turn. And as we’re looking at the housing market over the past month, we’re seeing a couple trends. The first trend is that the competition for listings is picking up a little bit. We’re also seeing that the amount of buyer activity is starting to pick up. So the first stat that we always look at on these updates is the new listing number, and part of that is to see how many houses are coming on the market, but that affects the amount of competition. Ultimately, at the end of the day when we look at the amount of pending sales and close sales buyer activity. So we’re kind of looking at what’s coming on and then what is coming off the market.

So 11.3% uptick year over year in the amount of new listings, but we’re seeing a slight, very slight increase from last month. So not much to talk about as far as the change from month to month, but year over year, 11.3% jump in the new listing activity. What’s interesting though is the amount of pending sales is significantly higher, 23.2%. So a lot more homes over the past month have come off the market. Some of those have not closed yet, and we’ll be closing next month. So we’re going to see larger close sales numbers in September, but right now we’re seeing that kind of preemptively as pending sales. Whereas last month we saw 790 pending sales, 860 this month, days on market is up, so there are houses that are sitting a little bit longer In Snohomish County, 21 days on market was the average time for a house to sell.

And as much as every seller when they’re listing their house wants their house to sell immediately, maybe get multiple offers on the offer review date. If there is an offer review date, that does happen, but the average is two to three weeks on the market. Now if we look at the median sales price, we’re seeing a 6.9% jump year over year. It’s pretty similar to what’s being experienced in King County as well. So this general Seattle area home prices are up almost 7% across the board. The average is up 8.6%. So if we’re looking at average sales price 8 64 9 47, if we’re looking at the median sales price, 7 7 4 9 98, so just under 800,000 for the median sales price and then well over that over eight 50 for the average sales price on average houses, Snohomish County are selling over the asking price and each city is a little bit different, but the average across the county, just over asking price, the supply of homes has also started to decrease month over month.

And that’s where I think this number is really important to pay attention to. We had 1.8 months of supply last month, which means we just had enough houses for 1.8 months of buyers is what this number means. And last month it was just the 1.7 number. Not super significant change, but we’re starting to see it going the opposite direction. Typically in the summer, we see larger numbers and an increase in the amount of supply. There’s a lot more houses coming on the market, maybe a little less buyer activity in the summer, then we start to see what we’re seeing right now. And that is more buyer activity and more so than the listing activities, not keeping up the amount of homes is not keeping up with the buyer activity. And so as we’re looking at Snohomish County and what’s going to happen the rest of the year, I think we’re going to see a pretty normal trend.

And that is that there are going to be fewer and fewer houses available. So we’ll see that inventory or supply number shrink rank, I think that we are in already. We’ve already seen mortgage rates come down considerably from where they were and we’re now right around 6.11% on mortgage news daily survey, which is better than 1% lower than we were last year. And the lower interest rate, if it keeps going down, we don’t know that. But if it does and it’s paired up with less inventory, I think we’re going to see a relatively competitive fall and early winter housing market. And that’s not abnormal in the Seattle area, but it’s pretty common for things to slow down around the holidays. But there are some exceptions to that. And when the inventory and if the inventory is low and the market is more conducive to buyers being excited and wanting to jump in to a purchase, we might see quite a bit of competition for the listing inventory that’s available.

So my thought overall is that we are going to see a relatively hot housing market in the fall, not necessarily like the hottest housing market we’ve ever seen here in Seattle, but at least hotter than what it’s been. And I’ve already experienced this week and King County in particular, some of that competition returning and in Snohomish County as well, getting buyer activity on some listings. I’ve also had a few listings though this week in Snohomish County where we didn’t see multiple offers or even an offer at all on the listing. So I think as much as we’re starting to maybe transition towards a little bit more competition on the listings, we haven’t quite hit that threshold where it’s significantly affecting all of the housing inventory. So for now, I think there’s still a balance between buyer and sellers negotiating power, so to speak. But as things start to transition and if the inventory our supply does dwindle, I think sellers are really going to be in the driver’s seat here as far as negotiations go, coming into 2025. Thanks so much for watching this month’s Snohomish County Real Estate Market update. If you have questions about your situation, I’d love to be a resource for you. And if you know somebody who could benefit from this content, please consider sharing it with them.