Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 8/1/23

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

All right, we’re jumping into the beginning of August. Summer’s in full swing and well, the seasonal summer slowdown is a real thing. We’re seeing it here this year as we look at the sneak peak, I’m gonna call it, of some of the data coming out here from last month. We’re gonna see that home prices are right around where they were at the same time last year. And I mentioned, and have been talking about this over the previous couple months that I think by the end of the year we’re gonna start to see houses up year over year versus down year over year. There was a massive drop-off that continued into the fall and winter, and I think this year’s gonna look quite a bit different in that regard. So a couple things, a little sneak peek at some of the data that we’ll be talking about in next week’s Seattle real estate market update, and also the King and Snohomish County real estate market updates.

Number one, King County’s median sales price, is right around 900,000. It may adjust a tiny bit as some sales are added, but that’s exactly the same as it was last July. If we look at Snohomish County median sales price 7 49, which is 2% down year over year, but again, trending in the positive direction or trending towards, similar to where we were at the same time last year. So lots of progress here so far in 2023 as far as catching up to the market and where it was last year. We still have a ways to go to get to the peak of the market, but as far as the year-over-year numbers go, we’re certainly making some headway. And speaking of headway, all of this is happening with interest rates increasing. So we just did a little year-over-year comparison from August to August 1st. So essentially July, 2022 and July, 2023’s numbers.

If we look at interest rates, interest rates last year, August 1st, according to Mortgage News Daily Survey. So they’re doing this survey every single day, and we talk about this every week on the channel. Interest rates were 5.05% last year in July, and that was a big deal. It was a really big deal because they were in the threes and even into the low force, they’d made a big jump. Interest rates are over seven this year, 7.1%. So we have a jump of 2.05% in interest rates since last year. And well, in King County, prices are about the same. So as far as affordability goes, it’s a lot more expensive to be buying a house right now than it was at the same time last year. Now, what happened last year as interest rates continue to climb, we were seeing interest rates in the low sevens in the fall, and prices were significantly lower.

And as interest rates dipped this year and have climbed back up, we’re still seeing the housing prices climb. And a lot of that’s been because we haven’t had as much supply as maybe people had hoped we would have to continue with the downward trend in prices, at least if you’re a buyer, right? Sellers don’t want to see their house going down in value, but buyers do. And so as we look at the activity from last week in King County and Salish County, we saw significantly fewer listings come on the market, 542 versus 626 the week before. As far as price reductions go, we had 334 price reductions versus 323 the previous week. Contingent sales, 22, same as last week, expired listings 38, but that’s at the end of the month. We really haven’t seen a lot of expired listings. Homes are selling, and if we look at pending sales, pending sales, were down week over week, 785 versus 864.

Sold listings, again, slightly up, I talked about that last week, end of the month, six 90 versus 6 37. And overall, what we’re seeing is that the inventory of new houses, the houses coming on the market, if we look at July’s data, and again, we’re gonna talk more about this in those monthly updates, but we’re seeing the trend continuing where we’re having significantly fewer homes coming on the market than normal for the time of year. But the pending activity, pending sales activity is relatively similar. It’s, it’s just down. So there’s, what we’re seeing is not as big of a buildup of inventory as we typically would see this time of year. And again, we’ll talk more about that in the next update. But wanted to share some of this data with you, give you a little sneak peek into the August real estate market updates. If you have questions about buying or selling in Seattle, or you want to talk a little bit more about your situation, please feel free to reach out.