Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 1/17/2023

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates in this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for January 17th, 2023.

All right, this is our second market watch of the year and we, well, we’re still seeing a lot of the same normal winter trends and that is that we don’t have a lot of houses coming on the market and we have a lot of houses going pending, and that just means that we’re continuing to see pressure on the existing inventory or supply of houses, and that number keeps shrinking. If you look back to the most recent Seattle real estate market update, I shared how the December numbers have come down to 1.1 month of supply and we’re continuing to see downward pressure on those numbers. So unless we have a flood of inventory and supply here at the end of the month, I would suggest that we’ll probably be down below one month of supply, which is super, super low. Everyone heading into the spring again here in 2023.

Now what does that mean? I think for buyers, that means there’s competition coming back in the market and I’m already seeing that. I’m seeing buyers doing pre-inspections again, I’m seeing multiple offers on listings. I had a listing myself recently where we had three offers. One was up just above the asking price and they ended up getting the house, but they reinspected the other ones. They were still trying to play by the rules that we’ve been playing by over the last six months asking for credits, paying less than asking price. But I’m seeing a trend away from that myself and also in conversations with other agents that have listings as well. So, heads up, I think we may see an interesting spring where we have lower inventory because, not because we have so many buyers like we did last year, but because we have so few listings as compared to normal.

Alright, let’s jump into the stats here real briefly and look at how the Seattle real estate market’s been doing. And just a reminder, we’re looking at King and Snohomish County, so both the whole region, and we’re looking at numbers over the last week for residential sales. Now new listings, 342 new listings compared to 338 last week. So pretty much the same amount of new listings over the last week. We saw some more houses come back on the market. 44, not quite as many as last week, which is, I guess not surprising because we came out of the holidays last week. List price reductions we saw 238. So we’re still seeing prices reduced, not quite as many as last week. List prices increased again, that always baffles me. I think half of those are typos. Usually <laugh>, sometimes maybe somebody sold for more than what their list price was.

Either way, those always make me laugh. contingent purchases 14 over the last week. Cross King Inno County. So there’s still opportunity there. versus 12 the previous week. Expired listings 36. Again, not quite as many as last week listings pending. All right, this is the one that we want to be looking at when we compare new listings 342 and we look at pending listings 587 pending sales. That’s more than 200 more that came off the market than came on the market, and that’s more than a hundred more pendings than last week. Sold listings 278 down a little bit from the previous week. again, last week was kind of right at the edge of the month, so anything that didn’t close in December might have closed the beginning of January. So again, not surprised to see that, but the pending sales is what I’m really looking at compared to the new listings because that’s that number of houses coming off versus going on.

And again, that’s two weeks in a row again, plus all the ones before where we’re seeing those numbers. higher on the sales versus the new listings in canceled listings, again, 78. some of those got re-listed or put back on the market but with new prices and things like that. So I think as we’re looking at the market here right now, the trend that I’m seeing is continual reduction in inventory. I’m not seeing a flood of new listings, which I didn’t really expect in January. I don’t think anybody expected. What I will say though is I’m starting to see more of that multiple offer feel again, buyers feeling like they need to see a house sooner and make an offer. There’s offer review dates coming back. So again, we don’t know what the future holds or what the spring’s going to look like or the fall, but right now we still have higher interest rates.

Interest rates were 6.17%. as of mortgage news daily today it’s down just a little bit from 6.21 last week, but we’re still hovering in that, you know, six in a quarter range. and that’s the prediction for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as we kinda head towards the spring and summers that we’re still gonna be in the sixes, but that we might start to see rates go down as we head into the end of the year. So I would say once we start to see rates dropping, we’re gonna see even more activity. and if we don’t have a lot of listings in the spring, which that’s one of my predictions, we’re gonna have fewer listings in the spring than we normally do. That could keep the balance that we have right now in the market. Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. If this video was valuable for you or you want to see others like it, please consider subscribing to the channel. And if you are considering a home purchase or sale here in 2023 and you want to chat, I’d love to connect with you about your real estate goals. I do make videos here on YouTube, but my main job is helping people buy and sell houses.