Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 7/11/23

Hey all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for July 11th, 2023.

Well, it’s Slurpee day and it’s also All-Star Week here in Seattle. Excited about Julio breaking the uh, record for most home runs in round, but kinda disappointed he didn’t finish it out. But, um, exciting times here in Seattle. The weather’s nice and you know, as we look at the housing market, this is always a weird couple weeks. You got 4th of July kinda sandwiched in between people taking vacations before the 4th of July and people taking them after kind of incorporating the holiday into their trip. So we’re now back into what will likely be that normal flow for the summer and that’s just people taking a lot of vacations around here. If you’ve been in the Seattle area for any length of time, you know that this 80 to 90 day period is where people take the majority of their stay-cations or local vacations, take time off, enjoy the weather.

So everything always shifts a little bit in the summertime. You have a little less buyer activity in any given week while people are on vacations, but you still have people listing houses. So typically we see listing inventory pickup and we see, uh, prices stagnate a little bit. So hopefully that puts a little bit of, uh, pressure on the price increases, keeping things, uh, a little bit more stable for buyers. And also interest rates have been ticking up. So that’s another factor that we’ve been encountering here lately. In fact, interest rates, according to Mortgage News daily, were at 7.09% as of today and they’ve been hovering around 7%, a little above 7% for the past few weeks and hopefully, hopefully they’ll drop a little bit as we get the new CPI numbers here coming out. But I think there’s still some concerns about future fed interest rate hikes, which just causes, uh, people to be concerned about the situation regarding inflation.

And inflation really is the biggest thing that’s been pushing our interest rates up for mortgages specifically. So as we look at the data, I just recorded the Seattle and King County, Snohomish County real estate market updates last week, those are on the channel and I dive real deep into the different numbers in those specific areas. So if you want to pay attention specifically to the monthly data in King County or Snohomish County or even the Seattle Bellevue markets, take a look at those videos. I’ll give you a quick little recap here for King County. So King County set a new all-time high for June, so not the all-time high, but June’s all-time high last month at 9 35 for the median sales price and 1,000,100 73,150 for the average. Both of those are June records in King County. Now, Snohomish County was down 3.2% over the previous year in their median sales price, 7 65 and down 1.8% on the average price.

A little over 853,000 for the average in Snohomish County. So looking at supply numbers we’ve been talking about, and we follow this on a weekly basis, the new listings, the pendings listings, the sold listings. We’re looking at about two months of supply in King County right now, which is a little higher than we’ve been seeing when the market was super, super hot. But this is relatively normal. It’s still really low actually for the summertime and we’ve been seeing that slowly trending up. The low supply was putting a lot of pressure on prices earlier in the year. Snohomish County is still 1.2 months of supply, so we’re still in a really low inventory environment in Snohomish County, but overall things are still selling relatively quickly. The days on market has been going down and we’ve also seen things selling for more than asking price on average.

Again, those are on homes collectively, right? That’s the average. So there are still houses selling below and still houses selling above. Now we’re gonna look back at data here from the past week now, right? The snapshot and new listings are relatively low. Again, this is just the time of year. I mentioned that right around the 4th of July, 537 new listings versus 5 93 a few weeks back. This was right before the 4th of July. We didn’t record a video last week. We did the market updates instead back on the market. 57, pretty much the same as the previous week list price reductions. We had 257 price reductions versus the 304 that we did a couple weeks back. If we look at contingent sales, we’re still looking at about the same number as a few weeks back. And this 20 or so sales has been our norm for a while.

And I think that’s because we’re still in an environment where things are sitting for a length of time in certain cases or not selling with multiple offers. And those houses and those sellers are more apt to take an offer from a buyer who needs to sell another property first before purchasing theirs. Expired listings, pretty low number, uh, 23, but it’s the beginning of the month. So not a lot of expired listings at the beginning of the month. Typically pending sales, 701 pending sales, uh, versus 8 53 the couple weeks before. Again, we’ve just seen a little bit of a lag in some of the buyer and seller activity over the holiday last couple weeks. I suspect that will pick up a little bit specifically on the seller end. Um, it’ll be interesting to see if the buyer keeps up and keeps up with the seller activity.

We’re still down if we look at the new listings and pending sales, about 30% roughly if you put King and Snohomish County together, uh, with new listings and with pending sales year over year. So still down significantly, but I’d be interested to see if that buyer activity keeps up and if we stay in that similar balance. Now, sold listings 5 37 down from the 6 47 a couple weeks back, but a couple weeks back was the end of the month of June. So, um, not surprised to see that canceled listings about the same. We’re we seeing some canceled listings? Most of those are those back on the market type of houses, but I think the hot take here this week is that things have been heating up. I think that they are starting to stall out a little bit. That’s the feel I’m getting. I don’t think that, um, you know, from the offers that I’ve been making with buyers, it’s not quite as competitive and listings not quite as much activity.

I think a lot of the summer activity is happening. People are traveling. I also think that interest rates are higher. So I think there’s a few different factors, like I mentioned at the beginning that are slowing things down a little bit. I still though wouldn’t be surprised to see home prices higher at the end of the year than they are right now. So if you have questions about what’s going on in the market, if you wanna talk about your situation, I’m happy to be a resource for you. But I hope that you got a lot of value out of this video. And if you wanna follow along with the channel, please subscribe.