Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 4/25/23

Hey y,all Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for April 25th, 2023.

All right, the housing market continues to heat up here in the Seattle area, and something I’m seeing more over the past few weeks is the listing inventory picking up more houses are coming on the market. Last week we had 536 houses come on the market, King Snohomish County, and that’s compared to 4 98 last week. So things are starting to pick up there with the new listings. We had a few houses, uh, come back on the market here as well. 33 houses back on the market list. Price reductions did increase week over week, 155 last week. 200 list price reductions here this past week. Contingent purchases also picked up week over week. 13 contingent purchases versus nine. Last week expired listing 16. That’s again middle of the month, so not expecting to see a lot of those and things are starting to sell. So we’re gonna see fewer and fewer expired listings here as we continue to move forward.

I think pending listings, also continuing to pick up 811 pending listings over the past week versus 736 last week. So buyer activities picking up as the listing activity is picking up, which again is pretty common for the springtime listings sold 560 listings sold, so still more sold than new listings over the past month and cancel listings about the same 44 versus 47 listings from the previous week. And I think the general theme that we’ve been talking about here over the past few months, and we’re continuing to see here, is that we’re seeing fewer listings than normal for this time of year, but we are starting to see listings picking up, which is a good sign here for the spring market. I couldn’t imagine if we would’ve stayed in this place where we were hardly having anything come on the market, but we’re still not seeing as many listings as we’re used to seeing this time of year, which is continuing to keep supply down, inventory down.

And as there are more houses coming on the market, they are also still selling. So we’re not seeing a buildup of housing inventory yet. But we did see last month a slight increase month over month. And I would expect that we’ll see that here as we continue into the rest of the spring and into the early summer. But I would be surprised, I would be surprised if we see the amount of supply that we saw in the summer as far as houses available on the market at any given time. I think the big trend that we’ve been seeing is that we’ve been seeing fewer listings coming on the market. We’re still seeing the buyer activity there and it’s keeping up relatively speaking here as we head towards the summer. So my, my hunch here as we hit the summer months is we’ll see more homes on the, but I also think that we’re going to see homes still continuing to sell at a pretty good clip.

We did see at the end of last month at our April market update, we saw that the time on market has been trending down. The median days on market has shrunk, although the average is still a little higher, it’s been trending down over the past few months. And I think we’ll continue to see that trend with houses selling quicker. And it’s interesting, we are seeing this place where some houses are priced a little bit higher maybe than they should be, and they’re sitting on the market. But we also have houses that are simultaneously priced maybe on the lower side of their value, and they’re selling quickly with multiple offers. So we have these two different things happening simultaneously. But I think that just means that if you’re priced right, if you’re a seller, that your house is still gonna move and you might have some competition.

But I would also encourage people that are thinking about listing their house this spring and summer that you want to be doing all of the prep work. I think that’s the big thing I’m seeing is you wanna make sure that you’ve got your house ready to move into for a potential buyer. Those are the houses that tend to be selling quicker right now. They always sell quicker, but in a previous, maybe even hotter market, anything sells, anything sells quickly. But right now, the houses that are tending to sell quicker are those that are ready to move into, maybe have a few updates or improvements. And they also are priced competitively. Interest rates have hovered in a similar place, um, as last week, 6.59% as of Monday, four 20 fours data off. Mortgage News Daley’s website, that was about the same 6.61 last week when we filmed this video.

Interest rates have been hovering in the mid-sixes to upper sixes to the low sixes, kind of in this six to 7% range for quite some time now. It seems that they found their range and I think buyers have adjusted expectations now too, that’s just what it is, but it’s still, if you’re a buyer, makes your monthly payments significantly higher than it would’ve been with those lower interest rates. So we’re still seeing that tug of war between affordability and supply and demand. But as of now, things have been picking up in the Seattle area and I think that we’re gonna continue to see maybe not a super hot market this spring and summer, but I think we’re gonna continue to see at least a warm market as we continue to head into the rest of 2023. Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. I hope this video was helpful for you. And if you made it to the end, I’d appreciate some love, comment, thumbs up. And if you wanna see more videos like this on a regular basis, please hit that subscribe button.