Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 12/21/2022

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for December 21st, 2022.

All right, everybody. We’re about to wrap up the year and it’s been a wild year, but we’re finally coming to the end of 2022 and approaching Christmas and New Year’s wrapping up the holiday season here. So real briefly, just wanna wish you guys all a merry Christmas, happy holidays. And as we wrap this up, I think we’ll do one more market update next week before the new year. I will say, I asked people to give feedback on the last one about whether they wanted me to keep doing these or maybe continue to focus only on the Seattle real estate market updates on the monthly basis with more of the data. so if you have an answer to that question or you have an opinion one way or the other, please drop a comment down. Give a like to the video. I’d love to know if you want me to keep doing these videos.

If you’ve already responded, you can’t. Again, just for fun, but I tried to engage with some of those comments here over the past week, but let’s jump into the data here. And looking at the new listings for the week, we saw 208 new listings down from 287. last week on the 14th, when I filmed the video back on the market, we saw 59 listings come back on the market. Last week we had 67. So we’re just seeing things continue to tighten up. As I’ve been talking about price reductions, we saw 191 price reductions, and that’s down significantly from 316. So we were talking about a lot bigger numbers earlier in the year, in the summer, and in the fall. Now we’re starting to see a lot fewer price reductions. I think part of that again, is because people are dialing in those prices and there’s not as many listings right now, so it’s hard to do price reductions for that number of houses.

Price increases, 17 contingent purchases, 16 contingent purchases last week down from 20 the week before. That number is also continuing to get smaller percentage wise, probably keeping in line with where we were in the spring or in the summertime, excuse me. But contingencies still a thing 16 in the last week, but not super, super common. So again, there are situations where sellers are accepting contingent offers. I mentioned this last week in the video, but we do have a client right now that’s in that process of purchasing contingent needing to sell their house. So if you’re thinking about buying in Bothel for around 1.2, give me a shout. Listings expired, 55 expired listings, 53 last week pending listings 523 versus 530. So still quite a bit of pendings versus the 208 new listings. So again, just a lot more houses coming off the market.

We’re continuing with that theme. Sold listings 468 closings. Those would’ve been from most likely pendings last month, and that’s up from 437 the week before. So usually towards the end of the month, that’s when we’re gonna see the closings. And I would suspect you know, this week, next week to have those closings be higher than they were earlier in the month. Canceled listings, we saw a few fewer canceled listings, 114 versus 1 73 last week. again, it’s not uncommon for listings to be canceled around the holidays. And we also had quite a few come back on the market, 59, so some of those would’ve been canceled re-listed. So maybe half of those came off the market altogether. Some of them will probably come back on after the holidays, maybe in towards the spring. We have a listing like that that said, Hey, let’s wait.

Let’s, let’s, let’s enjoy our, our Thanksgiving and our Christmas and not have anybody coming in through the house and let’s put it back on the market. After the new year rates, I think let’s talk about rates, mortgage rates. Still, even with the new increase in the fed rate, we’re still seeing fixed mortgage rates hovering around six and a quarter, just like last week. they were, I think last week in the video, 6.27 this week, 6.28 on Mortgage News Daley’s website as of today for the 30 year fixed. I think again, we’re just continuing to see that trend. Fewer and fewer listings as we finish out the year. I doubt we’ll see a lot of new inventory before the new year, unless they are in a position where they need to sell their house for maybe a contingent purchase, right? Those 16 contingent purchases are most likely also 16 new listings, maybe if they’re in other markets, right?

That’s possible. But all those people would need to also sell their homes, as is the case for our client. But I would suspect as we wrap up the year that we’re gonna see even fewer listings here on these, this chart. We might even see less than a hundred. but we’ll continue to see the pendings and the solds as we wrap up the year, which is just gonna mean we’re gonna start January with really, really tight supply. Again maybe not as tight as we’re used to the past couple years, but still we’re gonna be, I would say, probably around the one month supply or less heading into the new year with new buyers coming into the market. So again, I think I mentioned this last week, but I’m just gonna continue sharing these thoughts in case you don’t watch, people don’t watch these videos every week.

I really think that buyers as we start the year, are gonna start to have more options again, as more inventory comes on. I also think that there are going to be some new buyers getting into the market. I’ve been having people reaching out saying, Hey, I’m ready to get started after the new year. I’ve had people that have been reaching back out to me that I’ve talked with in the past, or I’ve reached back out to that are also wanting to get started. So there’s definitely people thinking about getting into the market here. Coming up in 2023, I think that sellers the best time of the year most likely to sell is going to be earlier in the year versus later in the year. So earlier in the later in the winter, maybe early spring versus later in the spring, which is historically the time where most people wanna sell their houses.

I do think there’s not going to be as many listings hitting the market in the spring as normal, mainly because of interest rates. I think people are going to be staying put in their houses. That’s going to be one of my predictions for the year. The people will stay put more often than not because they don’t want to trade. Maybe they’re two and a half percent mortgage, 3% mortgage for a six and a half percent mortgage, but at the same time, still, people need to buy and sell. So if that’s going to happen here this spring, but I do think that the market will favor buyers more towards the, the spring and summer months. But again I think as buyers, there’s opportunities to negotiate prices right now, interest rates are higher, but if you can get in and get a better price, now, sometimes sellers are even buying down mortgage rates.

So if you’re a seller and you need to sell, that’s a tactic to help buyers get into the house and pay the, the price that you want to have them pay, but buyers at the same time. that’s an opportunity for you to have a lot more affordable mortgage on a monthly basis until hopefully rates come down. So, a few tactics here as we finish out this update, but if you are watching this, I don’t just make content on YouTube, I actually do help people buy and sell houses here in the Seattle Bellevue area. So if you’re enjoying these videos and you want to connect about your individual situation, please feel free to reach out to me, especially if you’re thinking about making a move here in 2023. my contact information should be down here below somewhere in this video. Thanks so much for your attention. I value it highly. And if we don’t get to see each other here again before the new year, I just want to make sure that I say that here as we wrap up the year. We are making new content every week. So if you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, you wanna see these videos on a regular basis, please consider subscribing to the channel. And if there’s ever anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out.