Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 8/2/2022

Hey y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates and we’re gonna do a new video today. I’ve been getting a lot of questions around the housing market, what’s going on, and people want more information on a regular basis, right? I, I typically do monthly market updates for Seattle Bellevue area, but really we’re talking about the whole region, which is why I started making King and Snohomish County updates. But I think there is a desire for videos on a more regular basis, specifically tailored to the market. So I am taking the Market Watch Snapshot from the mls and I’ve got Snohomish and King County together and we’re just gonna go over this real quickly. I’ll give you a few thoughts, but this will be a quick hitter video, a little bit shorter update, um, a little less percentages and a little bit more numbers, but I think there’s some value to it.

So I hope you enjoy. Let’s take a look at this graphic. And again, this is just a snapshot right off the mls, but what I saw last week and what we’re seeing is more new listings, which is normal for this time of year. Uh, 869 new listings, a few houses coming back on the market. So we had 83 new properties coming back on the market. I don’t wanna speculate too much on what that means. Uh, maybe houses that came off jumping back in, it could be canceled listings that are re-listed, but what we’re seeing here is a lot of price reduction. So 889 price reduction. So more price reductions than new listings coming on. And I talk about this and have been talking about this over the past few months during my market update videos. So if you haven’t seen those or wanna see a little bit more in depth analysis on the market on a regular basis, monthly basis, please subscribe to the channel so you can see those as well as other videos related to real estate buying and selling in the Seattle area specifically, I think the big reason we’re seeing the price reductions is we’re trying to find what the market looks like, right?

Sellers have this expectation or had this expectation that their house was going to sell, or somewhere between five to 20% over and sometimes even more they might price aggressively and hope because of the competition that it’s gonna drive the price up. And then all of a sudden there’s this shift, right? Slow down, we’re calling it now, but the shift started. There was a shift that happened end of April, beginning of May, maybe even a little earlier where, you know, maybe we don’t price for 10, 15% below what we really want to get. Maybe we priced for what we actually want to get. And for a month or two people were getting those, asking prices are over, but then all of a sudden people didn’t want to pay that premium price that the neighbors were paying and they wanted to just kind of see what happened and houses out on the market.

So then now we have price reductions, houses sitting on the market for longer. Now that’s not every house, but there are quite a few houses that are having price reductions now. And even just sharing here more price reductions than new listings. I think that’s saying something now. Houses are still selling and we’ll see that, that here as we continue. But sellers are having to kind of readjust their expectations for what their house is going to sell for. As buyers are figuring out what do these payments look like? What am I willing to pay? What am I not willing to pay? Do I really like this house enough to make an offer? Or maybe I’ll wait, see if something else comes on. So there’s some more options for buyers. There’s a lot of different dynamics going on, but I think it’s important to note that there are a lot of price reductions right now, which means I think for buyers opportunities, that’s the key opportunities.

Does it mean it’s an opportunity for you? I don’t know, right? That’s not mine to say here on the video. Maybe it’s not an opportunity for some, but there are things that some people should be capitalizing on and starting to pay attention to. And I know I am paying attention, right? Seeing what’s out there. Um, a few listing increases, which always makes me laugh a little bit. Um, a lot of times maybe a house should have been priced a little bit higher in the beginning. So for me, that’s not really a strategy. If you’re pricing your house below what you’re willing to accept in the first place, it doesn’t really make sense, um, to, as a starting tactic, um, contingent though, 24 contingent sales in the last week in King Salish County, right? So let’s just say that’s 12 each, but still as a buyer, that wasn’t even an option, um, going back maybe even a month, two months ago.

So, um, definitely a good thing for somebody maybe looking to move up into something different or downsized and you need the money from the house that you have. You don’t have to maybe have some really expensive program that allows you to essentially have a bridge loan or have another company buy it for you and you buy it back from them, right? Somebody like Fly homes was doing things like that. There are also lots of mortgage companies trying to create similar programs to have a, an advantage tactically in the mortgage market, but again, now it doesn’t even really matter. Nobody really cares if you’re a Sameish cash buyer right now. It’s insignificant. They just want to sell their house and they want it to close. Um, so I think that’s the big thing there and that’s why contingents are being accepted again. And last week there were actually more contingent.

I don’t have the snapshot anymore, so it’s, I can’t, uh, give you the exact number. It only allows me to go back seven days on the, the market watch here, but the, there were more last week. So again, just an encouragement for buyers in the contingent status. Expired listing 77, not surprising, um, you know, houses maybe where people didn’t wanna drop the price and or they did drop the price but not enough to cause a sale. A lot of those will come back on the market, um, with maybe a different price. New listing agreement doesn’t necessarily mean people aren’t selling it. Just, um, well, listing didn’t sell in the amount of time that they were planning on, this is the big one for me. Pending listings, listings pending 1009, right? That’s more, that’s significant to me because the past few months as I’ve watched this, I’ve been seeing more new listings, more new listings, more new listings than pendings.

And to me that just means that when we look down at the data, which the next one will show us, we’re not gonna have very many solds. So if we’re looking at this month, we’re gonna have closed listings, sold listings 7 95 for the week, but we’re still seeing more new listings than solds. But what’ll happen is if we don’t have a dramatically larger amount of new listings, which again is pretty normal during the summer, not to have, we’ll actually start to see the inventory numbers going down instead of going up, which means buyers have less choice, there’s more competition, all those things. So I’m encouraged to see more buyer activity. I haven’t seen this many pending listings in a week and quite a while, so I do think maybe it has something to do with the Federal Reserve, increasing interest rates, maybe a little bit of confidence.

So maybe that’s an impact on the housing market. Um, but again, that’s a good sign for the housing market cancel listings. Uh, the last one on this 2 77 canceled for many reasons. A lot of times there’s like an old school tactic where you cancel the listing, you drop the price a certain amount, and then you put it back on the market and it’s kind of like new listing. So that’s being used and it’s kind of old school tactic. I don’t really think it makes much of a difference because buyers still see the days on market and it shows up on their searches online anyway with the reduced price. So I don’t know if that really matters as much as it maybe did before there was the plugins between MLS and other services like Zillow, Redfin, et cetera. But hey, I think a lot of people still do that.

And then some people are just flat out deciding they don’t wanna sell their house for the price that they could sell it for. And those are real things. I had a client that was, I would say, almost under contract on a house in Linwood, um, a couple months ago. And you know, unfortunately the seller as we’re negotiating decides, you know, we don’t actually wanna sell our house for this price, so we’re not gonna sell it anymore. Which was a bummer for us because I think they were gonna get it for 200 plus thousand less than what one of the neighbors had bought. Very similar house that was even smaller for. So it would’ve been really cool for them, right, to get that opportunity. But what I’m seeing too is even as mortgage rates have been stabilizing a little bit, so is the housing market. Um, so again, lots of price reductions, still trying to figure out where, where, where we’re gonna be.

There are some listings that started on in May and June and I have a listing like that that’s just been sitting for a little bit. And we’ve reduced the price a few times and I think it’s just eventually gonna come down to, you know, somebody that is excited about it for the price. And again, we’re still trying to figure where that’s at. So I guess my encouragement to you is as a buyer, there are opportunities, right? With all those listing prices being reduced. And I think for sellers, I think you can be encouraged that there are lots of pending listings. So houses are selling. So if you’re in a position where you need to sell, you can and buyers will buy your house. There are buyers out there, right? It’s just waiting for the confidence to return. But at the same time, if you don’t need to sell your house right now, maybe, maybe you’ll hold off a little bit. Maybe you waited this out because currently if you sell, you’re gonna most likely be getting a lot higher interest rate on any purchase. And you’re also, uh, going to be in a situation where you’re probably not getting as much maybe as buyers were paying earlier in the year. Thanks so much for watching our first Seattle Market watch. I hope that you enjoyed this video. I’d love some feedback on these if you like ’em. If you don’t like ’em, what you would change about ’em. Again, first video that we’re doing like this, I don’t want these to be super, super stat heavy. Percentage heavy because that’s what we do in those market updates. And my goal would be to even keep these a little bit more concise. But if you have some feedback or thoughts, please share those down below. And of course, if you enjoy the video, please give it a thumbs up.