Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 1/4/2022

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

I’m really excited to bring this video to you and I gotta say my voice is a little hoarse here today. might have overdone the talking yesterday, not sure but I think I sound a little different. So there you go. Let’s jump into the numbers here. And as we do that, I wanna get some feedback from you, so maybe drop a comment. but I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to hear in these videos. I’m not necessarily gonna redo everything, but I want to get these videos a little tighter. I want to add some new things to them and maybe subtract things if that’s necessary. So I’ve appreciated all the feedback here recently in regards to whether I should keep doing these and I’d love some more feedback on if there’s some changes or tweaks you’d like to see to these videos.

All right, let’s look at the King and Snohomish County sales and data here over the past seven days. Again, we’re looking at the residential data for the past seven days, and that’s what we do in these videos. The Seattle Bellevue region. Let’s look at new listings here. 186 new listings considerably more than last year, right around Christmas, but again, there’s usually not a lot of listings the week of Christmas or the week of New Year. So I suspect we’ll see some more new listings picking up in the next week back on the market a lot more than last week, which is to be expected. Houses that maybe were off the market during the holidays coming back on the market. 67 there. List price reductions 179 considerably more than last month more than a hundred, more than last week. Here. I think that you’re gonna start to see the remaining inventory that’s been sitting selling, and that’s been the trend here over the past few weeks because when there’s not a lot of new listings, but there’s a lot more pending listings, that means that some of those houses that have been sitting are finally starting to sell.

And that’s what we saw here when we jumped down to the solds and the pendings. We had 393 pending listings over the last week, and that’s up from 312 the previous week. and then we also had quite a bit of close listings here, 423 to wrap up the month. And again, end of the month is typically when you see the remaining listings get buttoned up. Some that maybe thought they were gonna close in the new year slid into the end of the month. And plus we’re accounting for a few that were very beginning of January here. Now, a couple observations, the preliminary numbers for January, 2020 threes update. So this would’ve been the end of the year data. December, 2023. Data looks like we had significantly, and I mean a lot fewer, looks like about 40% fewer sales in King and Snohomish County. We had almost the equivalent of reduction in new listings as well.

So what we saw is the supply, as I mentioned, continue to dwindle. We were seeing the supply numbers right around one month, which is still super, super low historically, and that looks like about where we’ll end up when the final numbers are tallied. I’m still waiting for the stats to be officially released, but just looking at some of the preliminary numbers, I think that’s where we’ll end up. Just interesting to see some of those thoughts we’ve been talking about come to fruition historically. We have even fewer listings during the holidays, but we’re seeing even larger pullbacks in the amount of listings and the amount of sales. So stay tuned for the next update. If you want more of the stats and data, that’s what those Seattle real estate market updates are for the monthly updates. These are more of a, a quick hot take on the weeks numbers in Kings and Hoish County, the Seattle region.

We are gonna look at mortgage rates here briefly. Fixed rates for 30 year mortgages according to Mortgage News Daily. as of today, 6.41%, which is down just slightly from the week prior. Mortgage rates have kind of been hovering in that six and a quarter to six and a half range for a while now. They were up into the low to mid sevens, so we’re, we’re still down from the high of the end of 2022. a lot of experts are predicting that we’re gonna see those rates come down towards the end of the year, not significantly, but a little bit. So I think that will help keep prices more stable if its interest rates don’t continue to climb. I think that’s a big factor and we’ve seen that the increase in interest rates has affected the prices for real estate. And, and if we look at that here, even again just preliminary numbers, but I’ll have more official ones here in a few days.

King County was at $820,000 median sales price last month, which is only up 0.6% year over year. So very minimal gain. Even though we saw the crazy climb, we also saw almost an equal drop in pricing from the earlier part of the year. So we’re looking at pretty much finishing the year around where we started in King County, Snohomish County finish the year and December median sales price 6 85, so down 2.6% year over year numbers. So I mentioned we’re gonna start seeing those year over year declines, but again, just a little sneak peak. And this may change a little bit as some of those final sales of the year are added in to the system. Seattle was up 6.3% at $875,000. And that’s something I’ve been talking about here as well for a while that Seattle has been the most stable out of all of the places in King and Snohomish County.

It didn’t see as much of the climb as some of these other places, but it’s also remained relatively steady with all of the UPS downs. So as a whole, the region has seen a lot of volatility, but Seattle itself saw the least amount of appreciation and has seen the least amount of drop off year. So Seattle showing positive 6.3% at least at this point. And Bellevue Bellevue’s showing a decline of 17% year over year in median sales price at $1,370,000. And the last time Bellevue had a median sales price below 1.4 million was back at the end of 2020. So that’s, well, interesting to say the least. We’ve been talking about this though for a while, that Bellevue is and has been one of the places appreciating and growing the fastest and clearly is experiencing some of the biggest declines and probably a big reason we’re seeing those King County numbers down places like Bellevue and others that saw some of those biggest growth year over year numbers the past couple years are seeing some of the bigger declines here. So again, just a quick sneak peek at the Seattle monthly market update coming out, hopefully in the next few days, just waiting for those numbers to be released. Thanks so much for watching this first Seattle Market update for 2023. If you have questions about the housing market in the area or want to talk specifically about your situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you want to continue to follow along with the channel and see other videos like this, please subscribe.