Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 2/1/2023

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for February 1st, 2023.

All right, everybody just getting back from vacation in Arizona. Got to spend a few days in the sunshine and well, a little bit of rain. It does rain there in the winter I guess. But getting back into it, and I wanted to get this update out to you ASAP P it’s gonna be one day later than our normal seven day window. So we’re still seven day snapshot of King and Delish County, but it will be over the past seven days, skipping one day. So I apologize everyone, but we’re gonna be looking at the stats here and just like I thought, and we’re gonna add a little clarity here at the end, but just as I thought we were starting to see inventory going down and slightly, but we have seen inventory continuing down here into the new year, which is a good trend for sellers, not necessarily it’s good for buyers.

Let’s look at the data now. And as we look at the data, we’ve got 350 new listings and last week we had 391, so fewer listings. Again, that’s been the trend and I really do think that’s going to be the trend for the beginning part of this year. Back on the market, 57, 64 last week. List price reductions, 203 as opposed to 239. So fewer list price reductions as well. List price increases 41 versus 39. Contingent sales. 18, same as last week. So again, we’re still seeing the contingent purchases in this market. It’s a little bit more balanced still. So if somebody that wants to make that jump buying and selling, this is still a time to make that happen. Expired listings, 48 versus 42, about the same there. Pending listings, this is huge cuz because this trend continues 766 pending sales versus 697 last week, but how many new listings did we just say 391?

So we had, again, almost twice as many sales versus new listings. So that number keeps picking up. Listings sold 331 versus three 20 last week. And again, the solds are from December, most of them. There’s a few that were in January that are starting to close now, but most of these are sales that were under contract and are finally closing. So if we look at January numbers here, if we, and we don’t again have the official numbers yet, but this is about as close as we’re gonna get for the moment. A little sneak peak January closings in King Snohomish County combined 1,121, which is about 30% fewer than we had the previous year. So in 2022 in January, we had about 30% more sales. If we jump over to the pending sales, you’ll see this activities actually picked up. So December we had 30% fewer sales, but in January we have 4.4% more pending sales in King County and 6.5% more pending sales in Snohomish County than we did even at the beginning of last year.

New listings have been down, like I mentioned, 1893 total, but both King and Snohomish County down 4.3% fewer in King County, 11.4% fewer in Snohomish County for the new listings. Again, these are, that one’s probably official at this point, right? Because those listings have already been added to the system, but some of these other data points will adjust as people put in last minute changes to the system. So we’ll have official numbers here soon, but as we look at the supply numbers, and this is the thing I’ve been talking about really since the fall started, is that the number is most likely going to shrink. And we’re seeing numbers similar to the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic and right before things started to really take off last time. Again, that’s no prediction that that’s what’s going to happen right now, but that is at least numbers wise where we’re at as far as supply goes one month in King County and 0.9 months in Snohomish County.

So that inventory is really tight. Again, not quite as tight as it was, but historically speaking we have extremely low inventory right now in King and Snohomish counties. What does that all mean though? And that’s always the big question and we’re looking at this every single week and next week you’re gonna get a lot more in depth look from me when I do the Seattle Real Estate market update, and we’re looking at Seattle and Bellevue Stats specifically, and then we’ll do the county updates where we dive into King County and Snohomish County individually. But I’ll just say, I know that when we do those updates next week, I’m going to be talking about how right now things are picking up and if you’re a seller, you’re going to want to list your house sooner rather than later. I would say. And for buyers, there’s not as much out there as maybe people were hoping.

And right now we have some supply suspect, we’re gonna see more houses coming on the market like we normally do in the spring and the summer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was less than normal. And interest rates have stayed about the same 6.16% as of today on Mortgage News Daily Lease website 6.21 last week. So again, they’ve just been hovering in this six and a quarter range for a while now, and some of the new Fed news is positive. And I would suspect that just like a lot of the major people like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are predicting that we’ll see rates being a little bit lower towards the end of the year and I would expect things to be picking up by then as well. So we might not have this buildup of inventory this spring, like some we’re hoping.

I think that big window of opportunity has already passed where we are getting mortgage rate buy downs almost all the time, and people were negotiating all the terms in their favor as buyers and also getting price reductions as a buyer. I think there’s still opportunities to take advantage of some of the negotiating power, maybe a lower price or maybe some better terms. Probably not a mortgage rate buy down, maybe if a house has been sitting on the market for a while. But I think that’s going to be the barometer. If the house is priced fairly, it’s going to sell fairly quickly, the house is priced a little high, it’s probably still gonna sit and might not have the competition. But I think some of that balance is starting to swing back towards sellers here as we head into the spring selling season. Thanks so much for watching my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch as we look back at the past week for King and Snohomish County’s residential sales. If you have questions about buying or selling at home in King or Snohomish County, I’d love to be a resource for you.