Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 12/14/2022

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Market Watch for December 14th, 2022.

I’ve taken a few weeks off from doing these videos for multiple reasons sick kids and all sorts of things, but getting back onto these again here, we’ve been doing these market watches almost every week since the market started shifting. We may change that up here in 2023. I’m not sure if people like these. So I guess if you’re enjoying these market watches or you’re following along, if you don’t mind dropping a comment and telling me, keep doing ’em, maybe just go back to the monthly market updates. If you’ve got some feedback, I’d love it. I do enjoy doing these videos every week, but I also don’t want to get into it too much if it’s overkill. So I know it was really important as the things were changing and shifting, but I think we’re starting to see the dust center a little bit. So for now, I’m thinking maybe we at the end of the year push these off to a monthly market update again without the filler.

But again, I’d love your thoughts for the upcoming year. I think we had some really good news this week with the inflation numbers and the economy. Now, again, we still saw it today. 1214 we saw another rate hike of a half a percent. So we’re now at <laugh>. the new high for the year on the rates and the CPI numbers were better than expected in the report yesterday, but still not great. So we’re still in this place where yes, inflation’s been slowing down, but we’re still in a high inflationary environment. So again, there’s so many different things that are moving and changing. I think the consumer confidence is better now than it was, but we’re definitely starting to see some of those effects of the increased rates for the short term. And in the housing market. Interestingly enough, since the last couple rate hikes, we’ve seen 1.25% rate hike over the last month essentially, and mortgage rates are down almost an entire percentage point.

So rates as of today on mortgage news dailies daily survey, 6.27% that’s where the mortgage rates were at. They were up close to seven and a quarter percent. So again, about one entire percentage point drop, even though those fed rates have been going up the market watch portion here, I think I mentioned in the past couple market watches, but also in the monthly market update that we were going to see these numbers start to change. I mentioned we were gonna see fewer new listings and I thought that was going to result in the supply numbers or the amount of houses on the market shrinking. And we’ve been seeing that over the past few weeks. I only have a one week snapshot for you because that’s how I do these videos, but take my word for it if you want. The past couple weeks have been very similar to this week and it’s been slowly getting there’s been getting less and less listings coming on here.

So we’re wrapping up the year mid-December in king of Snohomish County. We had 287 residential listings come on the market, which is again, not abnormal for the time of year, but way, way fewer than we were seeing back on the market. We had 67 houses come back on the market. again, most of those were houses maybe that were canceled and then re-listed. they’re not gonna show up as new listings, but they’ll show up as back on market. list price reductions, 316 price reductions. There are far fewer price reductions right now than there were, but that’s because there’s just not as many listings right now as well. I think it’s also easier to price houses with the data that we have versus trying to catch the market as the prices are coming down. List price increases. 13, again, hard to tell you exactly why some of those might be updated and then put on the market again with some changes.

And maybe they were under contract ahead of time maybe they were previous under contract, got a little higher price and bringing the price up. again, it’s hard to tell you exactly why, but there were 13 of those contingent purchases, 20 contingent purchases in the last week. I have a client that is one of those under contract on a house and listings expired 53. It’s pretty typical around the holidays, especially right before Christmas or Thanksgiving to start to see listings expire, listings pending 530 pendings. So 530 pending sales versus 287 new listings, which means we had almost double the amount of houses come off the market then go on. And we’ve been seeing that theme these past few mo few weeks. So it’s going to continue the theme of inventory shrinking. And again, in the January Seattle real estate market update, I’ll be able to reflect back and tell you what actually happened.

Right, and we’re looking at the weekly snapshot, but we’ve seen this same weekly rhythm the past few weeks. Sold listings 437 solds. Again, those are all listings that were most of them pending in November, closing in December, canceled listings, 177 canceled listings, some of them being re-listed, others being taken off the market. We had a client take a listing off the market a couple weeks ago. They wanna pause and wait until after the, after the new year to re-list. There’s also, when you take your house off the market in and it’s off for 60 days in our mls, you’re able to re-list it and it shows up as a brand new listing without any days on market. So in that case, it would show up as a new listing versus a back on the market, which is a nice status kind of clean start to the new year.

But as we’re wrapping up 2022 here, I’ll do at least one or two more of these here as we wrap up the year. But I think my thoughts as we’re looking towards the new year is that we are going to start seeing those year over year negative prices. And I’ve been mentioning this in some of my videos for a few months and it’s pretty easy to see that coming in the future. We had the highest prices we have ever, ever seen in the spring and early summer, and well, we’ve seen prices drop off, so it’s pretty easy to predict that we’re gonna be coming up on some lower pricing in the spring and summer than we did last year. So start, we’re gonna start to see those negative year over year numbers, especially with the price reductions, right? That’s another sign that we’re gonna see those negative year over year numbers.

I don’t expect that we’re gonna see a ton of extra inventory then we would normally see, but I do think we’re gonna start to see new listings again after the year, which will be a, a nice welcome site for buyers. People that are just getting started. I’ve been having lots of meetings with people that are just wanting to get started or people that were maybe sitting out for part of the year or even a few years that are starting to talk about wanting to get back into it. So I think there’s definitely a lot of buyers in waiting, trying to see, you know, what’s going to happen as we start the year. So I think sellers, if you are thinking about listing, I, I think you’re gonna want to do that sooner rather than later, earlier in the year maybe late winter, early spring.

I think historically we talk about the spring being the best time to list your house for multiple reasons, but I would almost say late winter, early spring is probably gonna be the better time this year because there’s going to be a low inventory environment as well. So even though there’s been less buyer interest, we’re gonna have less listings to choose from and less competition. So as people are getting started, they’re gonna be competing, quote unquote over a smaller amount of listings, even over the past few weeks with the in inventory shrinking and interest rates, stabilizing a little bit and coming down a little bit. I’ve had a few different clients in multiple offer situations. Again, there, it’s not a completely foregone conclusion that a house is going to sell below asking price. So if your house is priced right and or it’s a very desirable house so when I say priced right for the multiple offers, you really gotta be low, right?

You gotta be below what it’s worth to kind of get that activity. But at the same time, if you have a very desirable house as well and a desirable location and it isn’t the market value, it’s probably going to sell fairly quickly at this point as well. So good news for sellers that inventory is shrinking, that’s going to help with the, the prices. And for buyers, I think you’re gonna have a lot more options coming up in the new year. So if you wanna chat more about my thoughts or your situation coming up in the year, please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to be a resource or sounding board. and as always, thanks so much for your attention and have a great rest of the holiday season.