Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 2/7/2023

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for February 7th, 2023.

All right guys, this is the same day that I’m filming all my other market updates, which is really fun. But if you haven’t been paying attention to the King County, Snohomish County, or the Seattle Bellevue real estate market updates, I would advise that you do. Those are the market updates where I get a little bit more into the data for the entire month. It’s a look back, but also a little bit of a look forward. These are the every single week market updates, but if we wanna look back and kind of see what happened, I think those are a great way to do that. So if you’re not following along with the channel, please consider subscribing. Let’s jump in now to some of the numbers. In King County, median sales price last month, again, you’ll get to learn more about that.

In the King County market update, $790,000. There was an update to the numbers. they don’t change their reports, but the data has been updated slightly. It looks like $799,925 is the number there. Snohomish County, $689,970 is what the report says. But again, some of that data has been updated. It looks like 699k is the new median sales price there in Snohomish County. Both are right around breakeven. Snohomish County’s actually at 0.1% down in King County’s up 1.9% with the new data, right? and the previous data that’s been published is going to show slightly lower than that, but I think that’s a good sign, right? We’re kind of hovering right around where we were last year. As we head into the spring market. I don’t expect to see 20- 30% over asking price on offers, which would mean that we’re not gonna see median sales prices at the same level that we did last year, but I suspect it’s gonna be a little bit closer than maybe some were thinking.

Now, let’s look at the market watch snapshot here. So, new listings in Kingston County over the last week are down slightly from 350k to 325k. We saw a little bit more houses coming back on the market. I think people are starting to see that there’s some momentum and maybe if they took their house off the market, putting it back on. But we also saw some canceled listings here at the bottom of our report, 58. So some of those, again, are those back on the markets as well. But we did see more come back on than what were canceled last week. So I suspect there’s some people kind of jumping back in to the sales process list price reductions, we saw a fewer of those 182 versus 203. Again, I think we’re gonna start to see that trend where the list price reductions are going to shrink contingent sales, 14 down slightly from last week at 18, we’re still seeing contingent purchases. That was 14 in the last week across Kingston, Hummish County. But again, out of all of the pending sales, there were 829 pending sales. There was only 14 that were contingent, and actually the 14 would’ve been added onto that. So really a very, very small percentage still of the sales. a smaller percentage than I would’ve said maybe three, four months ago. But still, there are contingent purchases happening, most likely on those houses that have been sitting on the market a little bit. Expired listings 65, which is up from the 48, most likely, those that expired at the end of the year or end of the month, excuse me. Pending sales I mentioned are up considerably from last month, 827 pending sales. And if we look at sold listings, up 344 over the 331 the previous week. I think we’re gonna start to see those sold numbers catching up.

But again, the solds are from the previous month, so anything that went pending about 30 days ago, 21 to 30 days ago, is what’s going to be closing. So I’m always looking at the pending number for what’s happening right now. So that’s why we focus on that new listings, pendings, and the mortgage rates. I think that’s an important one to talk about here today, because mortgage rates have jumped the initial announcement from the Fed that rates were going to be only going up a small increment of 25 basis points 0.25%. Well, that made interest rates drop a little bit towards the end of last week, but as we’ve kind of started off the week, there’ve been some other talks about maybe adding some new bonds to the supply, and we’re seeing those rates jump. So 6.45% was the survey rate on Mortgage News Daily, which is the website that we usually follow along for these videos.

And it’s a great resource. Every single day they’re updating their survey from lenders across the country. Rates are up about a quarter of a percent from last week. Last week when we recorded the video, 6.16% was the average rate on their site. In this week, it’s gonna be the 6.45%. Rates have generally been relatively stable over the past few months, which I think has helped with buyers starting to just accept where rates are at. There’s less uncertainty, but again, there’s always uncertainty with rates. They’re changing every single day. I want to answer a couple questions though. I had somebody ask about the inventory, and I I think it’s important to mention, I know we’ve been talking about inventory declining over the past few months. It is extremely normal. It is normal to see inventory declining into the winter and specifically into January and early February.

If we were seeing the inventory numbers going up that early in the year, that would be a really big red flag to me. It would mean that there aren’t enough buyers in the market heading into the spring. It’s normal to see inventory start to pick up in the spring, which we saw last year, but we saw even more than we would normally see. but the biggest reason that inventory numbers increase last spring was just because a lot of buyers disappeared. And this year we’re seeing buyers in the market and we’re seeing fewer houses being listed or right around the same numbers. So again, inventory, there’s a couple ways to look at it. There’s how many houses are coming on the market, and then there’s how many houses are coming off the market. And we can look at that average or that number of like, okay, is are we seeing more coming on versus coming off.

But typically the supply numbers, which would be how many houses versus how many buyers are, are out there, that is typically lower in the winter. And then we’ll pick up into the spring. So this year is about normal as far as the amount of change or the delta, but we do have more supply right now than we have over the past few years because we’re starting from a much higher point. We had over two months of supply in the spring and it’s dwindled down in King County. It was at one month of supply in Snohomish County, was 0.9 months of supply for the last last month. so again, those numbers are declining. It’s completely normal, and I would expect to see more listings coming this spring and those inventory numbers to go up as we head later into the spring and early summer.

Thanks so much for watching this Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. If you want to get more in-depth info about the Seattle housing market, please subscribe to this channel. We talk about the King County markets, the Hoish County market. We talk about the Seattle Bellevue markets more specifically, and we’ve got a lot of other real estate content on here. If you found this video helpful, please consider sharing this channel with other people that you know. And of course, if there’s any way that I can bring value to your real estate situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out.