Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 7/24/23

Hey, y’all. Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for July 24th, 2023.

Alright, well summer is in full swing in the Pacific Northwest and well everybody is taking all those vacations they’ve been stalling and procrastinating on and really more likely looking forward to all year long using up their uh, well-earned vacation time. And what that does to our market is something that we see every year and that’s that things slow down a little bit at the beginning of the summer. I don’t know if we can really call it weird though because it happens regularly even in the hottest markets. We see things slow down a little bit in the summer. I think it’s a combination of people being outta town and more listings coming on the market and we’re not seeing like a ton of new listings coming on the market, but we’re certainly seeing a, little bit of a slowdown in the buyer activity over the past month or so.

And that’s something that, um, we talked about on the channel that that this has been happening and building a little bit since maybe mid-June. And although there is that normal seasonal slowdown, I think, I think we’re gonna see things pick back up again in the fall just like we normally do as well. So I would just say what’s happening right now in the market is normal for the summertime. I don’t think what we’re seeing is something like what we saw last year, which is where prices dropped into the mid 10 20, sometimes even 30% drops from the highs of the year. I don’t think that’s what we’re experiencing right now. In fact, I think we’re gonna see prices year over year at the end of the year higher than they were at the beginning of the year, right? So if we start to see like year over year numbers at the beginning of the year, they were all negative.

And I think if we look at the year-over-year numbers towards the end of the year, at least in the Seattle area, I think we’re gonna see positive numbers. So again, I wouldn’t be panicked if I was somebody thinking about buying or selling in this market right now, but it is seasonally slower in the summertime. And I think a lot of it has to do with the buyer activity or lack thereof. And something we’ve been talking about for a while this year is that there’s been a decrease in listing activity and that’s been true. Same thing with a decrease in buyer activity. Those have been in concert with each other and right now what we’re seeing is, in my opinion, less of that buyer activity, even less than we were seeing. But the listing activity is remaining relatively consistent for what we would expect to see this time of year still lower, but more than what we were seeing earlier.

So, um, if we look at the data here we are seeing less new listings than we did last week, 626 across King and Snohomish County over the last week versus 678. So a decrease there in the new listing activity. We’ve seen a slight, slight in price reductions 3 23 versus three 19 last week. So again, things have been sitting a little bit longer this time of year and so sellers are adjusting their price, maybe pricing up a little bit, right? As the market’s climbing, that’s what happens, right? You start to price to what the comparables are, but if things start to slow now all of a sudden you need to pull back a little bit. So I think this time of year it’s a lot more common to see price reductions and we’re starting to see more of those than we were earlier in the year.

Well, not as many at the very beginning of the year, but I think you know what I mean, as of the last few months, we’re still seeing a few contingent purchases, 22 versus 19 the last week. So yeah, a slight uptick, but about the same amount of contingent activity a little bit for those that are new, that’s people that are buying a new house but they need to sell the other one before they can close on the purchase of the new one. Not super competitive as far as an offer if there are multiple but allowable in this market. And I just saw another one go contingent the other day in Edmonds. So if you’re looking in Edmonds, well contingent purchases are a real thing. Expired listings pretty low, but that’s just not gonna happen. End of the month. Next week we’ll probably see some more expireds, but there’s not as much expiring right now, which is a good sign.

That means things are selling pending listings are up quite a bit. 8 64 versus 7 87 last week. So almost a hundred more pending listings and we’ve been seeing more new listings coming on, but we’ve also seen stuff selling. So things are certainly selling right now, right? Even though the market has slowed a little bit for the summertime, we’re still seeing a lot of pending listings and things still selling relatively quickly. But not everything. That’s the narrative, right? That’s what we are seeing. Some stuff is selling like that and I think I mentioned last week a listing of mine in Edmonds selling in 24 hours and a couple other listings. One’s been on for three weeks, another one, my own has been on for almost two weeks. So I think there’s a little bit of parody on what’s selling quickly, what’s not selling quickly. And maybe that’s another conversation for why.

But a lot of it comes down to what people are looking for and some houses always sell quickly no matter how the market’s going. And so that’s in there as well. If we look at sold listings, more sold listings, 6 37 versus 600, we’re nearing the end of the month. So we’ll start to see. I would say next week we’ll probably see the most for the market watch as far as closings that are happening right at the end of the month and canceled listings. I mean 95 last week, 101 this week, 75 last week back on the market, 69 back on the market. So I mean, we’re seeing a lot of those canceled listings coming right back on as homes getting essentially re-listed. But overall, I mean I think we’re seeing pretty normal summer stuff. I think we’ve talked about interest rates being higher. Last week we spent a little time talking about why the market’s been shifting a little bit and interest rates are a real factor.

The, the summer slowdown is a real factor. Interest rates have really been relatively stagnant over the past few months. I think a lot of people were hoping they would drop me included. And there were a lot of people predicting mid to end of 2023, we’d be seeing interest rates dropping. And really we’ve seen them go up and kind of hover in the low sevens, high sixes and last week we were 6.9%, uh, when I filmed. And today, uh, at 7.04 on Mortgage News Daily’s survey. So again, hovering right around 7%, not our high for the year, but also not our low. And that’s a real factor for people when you’re considering a purchase, the larger the purchase. And I think that’s what’s happening more on the higher end, middle to higher end homes is when you have those higher interest rates, those payments are a lot bigger.

There’s larger debt. So you have more, I would say, more impact on those higher price points than you do maybe on the median or below median price points in a given market segment. So overall, I think we’re seeing normal stuff for the summer. I think we are seeing things slowing down though in the Seattle housing market here. Um, if you have questions, if you’re a buyer or a seller thinking about making a move, I’d love to be a resource for you. And of course if you wanna just talk about your situation or if you have comments, feel free to drop those in the comments and I’d love to engage with you.