Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 11/15/2022

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for November 15th, 2022.

Jumping back in here with these updates, I took a few weeks off, I was at a conference for a week, and then I was sick and had the flu. Nobody enjoys having the flu. And then we did the market updates here last week. So finally getting back into these market watches and things have started to change a little bit, and I mentioned in my last market watch that we were gonna start to see fewer and fewer houses coming on the market and continue to see some of these houses that have been sitting on the market for a little while, see those price reductions finally sell. And that’s just meaning that we’re seeing a continual tightening here of the supply. And good news, last week we saw that the CPI numbers were better than expected. inflation is still high, but it was better than was projected year over year.

And I think we’re gonna start to see those declines here as we start to look at year over year numbers now going forward. and that’s what I was anticipating here as we were heading into the most recent updates. So a lot of the people I follow have been talking about that, hold on, wait till we see, you know, the year over year numbers here as we started to see those really high inflation numbers and they are slowing down. So that’s an encouragement. But the Fed is saying, Hey we’re, we still have quite the battle here and we’re not done raising rates and we’re not, you know, gonna stop doing that here just because of some of this data. So we may continue to see those fed rates going up. But good news, mortgage rates actually came down here last week fairly sharply.

we saw a nice drop from like the low sevens now as of today on mortgage news daily, 6.61%, so rates have come down a couple hundred bucks a month savings for buyers. So anybody that was kind of in that spot, I know that my go-to loan officer was waiting to lock rates until some of this news came out. Rates have come down on mortgages, which is great, but it’s not in any massively substantial way. So I don’t know if that moves the needle for anybody who’s been sitting on the sidelines, but more continued positive CPI numbers month over month may continue to push rates down a little bit. Again, the positive news helps. The stock market also jumped fairly considerably. and so I think the markets in general like the news, which is good. Again, the Fed saying, Hey, it’s not quite as good as everybody expects.

but again, still a welcome sign of relief here. And if we look at the market stats which is why we do these videos every week. new listings 442 for King in Snohomish County. Over the last week, residential listings, we saw a few houses coming back on the market, 74 houses maybe that were canceled or temporarily off the market, or if we saw people that had canceled their listings or 198 canceled listings some of those were already back on the market. as back on the market listings, we saw price reductions, 534 price reductions, but that is considerably less than we were talking about a few weeks ago and even a month or two ago. And so that’s encouraging. I think people are finally kind of finding the right pricing houses. were selling a little bit faster, even last month <laugh> than they had previously.

And we even saw numbers in Seattle specifically up up from the month over month numbers versus down. So that was also an encouragement. I think as we’ve seen rates drop just a tiny bit but as we’re starting to see inventory shrinking, pricing is stabilized a little bit. People are still getting a deal right now significantly. and I mentioned in my market update anywhere between 10 to 15% in King in Snohomish County, but in certain areas you’re getting even more of a discount than you would’ve had if you would’ve bought in the springtime. so lots more price reductions right than increases. I’m always puzzled by the list price increases. Sometimes people will take their house off the market and do some updates, put it back on for more. but that always puzzles me in this market. contingencies, we’re seeing fewer contingent offers.

21 contingent contracts over the last week. We were seeing 40, 50, 60 of those here even a few months ago. expired listings, not a ton, but we did have a few pending listings, 641 versus the 442 new listings. Again, that just means there’s more coming off the market than going on the market. meaning that the supply numbers are gonna continue to shrink here. And I do suspect we’re gonna see this as we continue through November and into December. So I think our inventory is gonna be pretty tight heading into the new year. last one here, sold listings, 525 sold listings, again, more than the new listings, and those would’ve been listings that went under contract last month. But overall for the housing market, I think seeing inventory coming down is normal. So that’s a good thing. We, if we were seeing the opposite right now, I would be ringing the bell, so to speak, that it, it’s something to maybe be concerned about.

But right now we’re seeing very normal things for this time of year. We’re seeing prices stabilizing a little bit. We’re seeing the amount of inventory decreasing, we’re seeing fewer listings coming on the market and we’re still seeing sales houses are still coming off the market. So as far as I can see, right, what’s actually happening is we’re still seeing people buying and selling. We’re still seeing houses coming on the market and at this point, no signs of any massive changes or disruptions at the moment. But again, interest rates are still high and we do have decreased interest. So we may see things start to change as we head to the spring, right? We might see that inventory rise up like it did in 2019, but right now the market is acting fairly normal like it does in the fall, heading into the winter in the holidays.

And at this point, I have no reason to report that you should be panicking right now, but I think you should be aware, I think for sellers, the holidays right now for people that have their house on the market are hopefully gonna help them get their house sold and finally move on from it, right? Because there’s going to be less houses on the market for the people that need to buy. and I think for buyers, there’s still opportunities, right? Rates are still high, so people are still sitting on the sidelines, whether that’s because they’re afraid or because of the affordability issue. inflation is the big barometer here as we’re looking at the mortgage rates, the concerns over inflation. as we saw here last week when we saw better than expected numbers, again, they weren’t great, but better than expected, the market responded in, in a positive way.

So stay tuned here as we are, I think should be paying attention to these inflation numbers and I think that’s gonna be a big part of what happens with rates, specifically mortgage rates as we head into the new year. And that will, I think, have a big impact on how we start 2023. Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. If you want to hear my most recent thoughts a little bit more in depth on the market, take a look at the November, 2022 Seattle real Estate market update. We’ll put out another one here in a couple weeks. We do those each month. But if you wanna follow along with the channel, please consider subscribing. And if you want to talk more about buying or selling in the Seattle area, please reach out.