Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 5/30/23

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for May 30th, 2023.

What’s up, everybody? I hope you had an awesome holiday weekend. I know that we did as a family, traveled over to Eastern Washington getting back into the office here and not surprised to see the numbers for this last week. Typically when we have a holiday weekend, and mainly when we’re looking at the Memorial Day and Labor Day weeks, when we’re still in the uh, prime listing time periods in the Seattle area, it’s interesting to see how many fewer houses are listed, but it makes total sense, right? People are going on vacation and unless you have to sell your house in a specific timeline, sometimes people will hold off or they’ll list earlier, if that makes sense. So looking at the data here, we’re seeing that clearly reflected, um, specifically with the new listings. So we had 433 new listings come on the market versus 731 listings last week.

And we’ve been talking over the past few weeks about how the amount of listings is starting to become a little bit more normal. We’re starting to see more housing inventory coming on the market, but we’re still at the end of this month going to see, I think this last week help cool that down a little bit and we’ll most likely still be far behind the normal or at least last year’s amount of new listings. And that’s because the pending sales continue on. So even though we had a holiday week, it doesn’t really affect the amount of sales happening, it’s just the amount of new listings, right? So the pending sales this last week, 789 in King and Snohomish County versus 819 the week before. So pretty small drop-off compared to the drop-off from the 731 listings down to the 433 new listings. Now if we look at canceled listings, 58 canceled listings, but then back on the market 42.

So most of those coming right back on after being canceled, sold listings. Sold listings were down quite a bit. Uh, 618 last week, 517 this week. And now that we’re hitting the end of the month, we’re probably going to see quite a large portion closing right before the end of the month. We’ll also see a big amount right at the beginning of June as well. Some of those that didn’t quite make the uh, end of the month cut expired listings 14. What we’re seeing is not very many anymore, right? We were seeing a lot larger numbers of expired listings. Most things are selling now within their allotted time periods and the contingent purchases are up a little bit 21 contingent purchases versus 12 last week. And that’s another theme we’ve been following along as our house is still selling contingent on the sale of another house.

And the answer is yes, but when we look at the number 21 contingent versus 819, which was last week or 789 this week, that’s a very small percentage of the sales that are happening in that manner. So very difficult, but still possible, especially in some of the outlying parts of King and Snohomish County, not really seeing it in Seattle, Bellevue and the surrounding suburbs much. It’s more on the fringes, I would say, but we’re still seeing it a little bit, especially if a house has been sitting on the market for a little bit and maybe priced on the higher side of its value. Um, and then interest rates. This is a big one. So interest rates jumped up into the sevens last week for the first time since March, and now we’re hovering there. We’re at 7.02% for the 30-year fixed rate. Now, some of these other loan programs are a little bit less.

They typically are, the 30-year fixed is typically the highest, one of the common loan programs, but also the most used loan program. So that’s why we talk about that. But two weeks in a row up over 7%, we saw the new debt ceiling passed, and we’ll see how that affects things. Some people think it’s going to make rates better, some people think it’ll make them worse, we’ll see. But rates are still high, and we’re still seeing the inventory shrinking in the housing market and the competition picking up, which is not what a lot of people expected. A lot of people thought that we would see a slower housing market because of the interest rates, and we are in some sense, but again, we’re still seeing the amount of sales keeping up with the lack of supply. So we’re not seeing as many listings, we’re seeing fewer purchases, but that number is continuing to stay about the same.

And even last week, more multiple offer situations that we dealt with. So again, multiple weeks in a row now, multiple offers, multiple offers, multiple offers. Almost everything is starting to be more competitive. So if houses are priced in their correct market range, they’re selling quickly and they’re selling over asking price. So I’m excited to share the stats with you, the Seattle Real Estate Market Update Stats, king County Market update stats, and St. Hoish County market update stats. Next week we’ll be doing those videos, so stay tuned for more information on the Seattle Housing Market. Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Real Estate Market Watch. If you made it to the end, please give some love with a comment or thumbs up. And if you want to hear more information like this on a regular basis, please consider subscribing to the channel.