Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 3/1/23

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

Now I gotta make fun of myself real quickly, this is the second go at this. I accidentally forgot to hit record on my mic. So here we are filming this for a second time. So I hope it’s even better than the first one was. Well, the market has certainly been heating up here in Seattle over the past month or so. Now the weather hasn’t been cooperating. We’ve had snow over the past few weeks. Before we dive into the weekly stats here, I want to give you a little sneak peek about where we’re at. And we’ve talked about this over the past months that the housing market is down, right? Prices are down this month we’re starting to see the continuation of those negative year over year numbers. So Seattle, and again, this is preliminary, so some of this will adjust over the next few days as the data’s updated, but Seattle looks like down about 11% year over year in median sales price.

Bellevue down 29% and King and Snohomish County are both down about 8% on average. some of those bigger places, higher price points on the east side are where we’re seeing the biggest drop-offs in the median sales prices. But with all that being said, we’re starting to see a pickup in activity and that’s what I mean by the markets heating up. I don’t think that the prices are dramatically higher, anything like that. And it’s certainly not what’s happening, but we’re starting to see a return of activity into the market, which is exciting or at least encouraging, right? As we’ve been going through a lot over the past eight months or so. If we look at the new listings here, we had 378 new listings this past week versus 301 the previous week. More new listings equals I would say good. We need that back on the market.

We had 53 back on the market, A lot of that would’ve been those canceled or the expired listings from this last week. About the same though as a previous week. Price reductions 154 versus 171 last week. So fewer price reductions, and that’s something we’ve been talking about for the, I don’t know, past few months that we’re just seeing fewer and fewer of those. I think some of that’s because we have less listings on the market and I think another piece of that is, well, people are starting to price a little bit more in line with what the market is because it’s pretty obvious now. You can see, hey, my neighbors sold for this. If I wanna sell my house, I need to price it in this same range that’s going to cause it to sell. some people still are pricing higher and hoping to get more, but they really aren’t getting more contingent purchases.

15 versus 17 last week. Again, kinda in that same range, still a window up opportunity, right? For buying and selling simultaneously. With that contingency, we finally made it to pending listings, which is the data was most excited to talk about today because I’ve seen some comments on the channel around this data point and quite frankly, I don’t know where the information’s coming from to the contrary or where the individuals are getting their information. But when I look at the pending sales here, 685 first, I just want to say that’s pretty encouraging, right? Seeing the activity level. But I want to clarify this data point just so it’s not a question mark for people. So pending listings, it’s King and Snohomish County data over the last seven days. That’s what we’re always looking at in these market watches and pending listings are either houses that were active or for sale on the market and have come off the market.

So they’re in this kind of limbo land they haven’t sold yet, but they’re also not still on the market, right? So they’re in this pending status. This data point is anything that was on the market and now off the market or anything that was already off the market and had an updated status. So if you were maybe pending inspection or you were contingent on a home sale and now you’re not, those are pending statuses that are now strengthened by maybe going into this pending phase where there’s no more contingencies involved. So this pending stat includes brand new pending listings and some that were already pending that had updated statuses, but it’s not a rolling number of the past 30 days. It’s only a seven day snapshot, but it does include some that were already for sale and are closer to being sold as I would put it.

So maybe, maybe 25 to 30% of these. Again, that’s a rough ballpark, might be houses that were already under contract and became closer to being sold. The majority of these pending listings are going to be new pending listings, but the idea is that these are moving in the process towards being sold. So there’s an advancement of that, whether they were active and off the market or already off the market, but again closer to being sold. So I hope that’s clarifying for you. I think it’s still a great number to be reporting because it is showing the activity and the intent if there is some of those that are already off the market to continue towards the sale, which eventually becomes the sold listings 607 as we wrap up the month and 429 last week, it’s pretty normal at the end of the month to have the largest batch here.

A couple more snapshots to wrap up this section here for sold listings for the month of February. So the last month down about 13% in Snohomish County and down about 15% in King County. New listings down about 32.5% in both King in Snohomish County, very close. Again, these numbers are gonna change slightly by the time I do those updates. And then the pending sales number, 20.8% down in King County and 9% down in Snohomish County. Although we’re seeing a decline in the pending sales and the solds, we are also seeing a even greater decline in the new listings, 32.5%. I think for me, seeing the supply numbers down below 1% now in King Snohomish County, it’s encouraging. People have been asking me, why are you encouraged by where the housing market is right now with prices being down and all the news and the concerns, you know, foreign and domestic, and also with mortgage rates being where they’re at.

And as of yesterday on mortgage news, daily rates we’re at 6.85% for a 30 year fixed, which is about the same as they were last month at 6.88. How can you be encouraged? And the first part is, I’ll admit, I am an optimistic person by nature, specifically when it comes to the housing market in the long term, right? The short term is really hard to predict, but long term, I’m a very optimistic person specifically around the housing market. But the other part that’s encouraging to me is despite all of the negative news and the concerns and the market and the economy, and with mortgage rates being higher, we’re still seeing activity in the housing market and the housing market activity is picking up. So to me, that is an encouraging sign that people have confidence in the housing market. Even with all of this going on, people still need a place to live. The market’s not being flooded with a bunch of new listings and people that are afraid people are staying in their houses, keeping the houses that they have. The housing market is still functioning fairly normally at this point for this time of year, and I think that’s what’s encouraging to me. Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. I hope it was as good as the one that you didn’t get to see. Anyways. If you have questions about buying or selling in the Seattle Metro area, please don’t hesitate to reach out.