Seattle Real Estate Market Watch 8/22/23
Hey all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates, and this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for August 22nd, 2023.
August, 2022. Last August, we started filming the first Seattle Real Estate Market Watch videos, mainly as a response to the quickly shifting Seattle housing market and really across the country. The markets were changing pretty dramatically entering a season of correction. And well, we’ve kept doing them per popular request and we just kind of crossed that one year mark here a couple weeks ago. So wanted to celebrate that and thank you all for paying attention and watching these videos on a weekly basis. I hope that you’re getting some value out of it. In fact, I’d love it if you would comment down below or even drop a thumbs up if you want me to keep making these videos as the market changes less and less on a regular basis. I don’t know if it makes sense to continue doing these, but if that’s what everybody wants, I’ll continue making these weekly videos.
One thing that keeps changing or seems to be changing almost daily right now are mortgage rates. And I was looking back at the rates from last week and last week’s video mortgage rates were around 7.26% on Mortgage News Daily’s survey. And if you’re new to these videos, I like to look at the Mortgage News Daily website. There are lots of different rates out there for mortgages, and you’ll find a different rate on every single website. So I think Mortgage News Daily does a great job of bringing data together and giving us an average, giving us something to shoot for and know, okay, yeah, these people are a little on the higher side. These people are a little bit on the lower side, but this is our average rate that we’re seeing for any given day. So I like their product and their website. I also was looking back at last year and since we’ve been doing these now about a year, it makes sense I think to look back and see where we were and where we are.
And last year rates were 5.73%. That was as of 8/23, so that would’ve been a day ahead, but at the same time, I think it’s a good snapshot. So we’re seeing rates almost 2% higher. A few weeks ago I said they were 2% higher, but rates were climbing then just like there or have been climbing now. And if we look at the data from this week, we’ll also find for the housing market data, we’re going to find that man, things have changed a lot since the same time last year. And I think a big part of that is because the inventory or supply of housing was quite a bit larger than what we’re seeing right now in the housing market. I think that’s a big reason that things look so different. But rates we talk about rates are so much higher, there’s less people doing the buy and sell right now and a lot more people sitting put, I had a client yesterday that was a purchase last year and they were going to sell and then they didn’t do it and we were chatting yesterday and he said he’s got the golden handcuffs on.
And it made me laugh, but I think that’s a good way to describe why people aren’t making moves as much right now. And that’s because if they already own something and have a two and half to three and a half percent interest rate, it really does act like a pair of golden handcuffs. It’s tough to make that jump into the higher payment with a higher rate and really paying about the same as what you would’ve been paying at the same time last year. So let’s jump in and look at some of this data here real quick because I know that’s why you’re all here and why you watch these videos. So if we look at last week’s data from King and Snohomish County, again, this is the single family sales. Over the last week we’ve got 507 new listings in King and Snohomish County, which is down from last week, 560 new listings last week.
If we look at last year, 719 on the same day approximately, so quite a bit more coming on the market. We had 308 price reductions this last week versus the 333 last week. If we look at last year, this is crazy, we had 740 price reductions to report last year at the same time. So quite a bit less activity, new listings and quite a bit less on the price reduction side. And as we’ve been talking about this whole spring, some homes are selling quicker and some houses are taking a little bit longer to sell, but there aren’t as many that are needing price reductions. It’s also a little bit easier to price when you’re not in a market that’s shifting downwards. It’s hard when you’re seeing houses sell and most real estate agents are pricing based on what recent sales are and if the market is changing in any direction going up or down.
If it’s going up, cool, you have multiple offers and houses are selling over asking price, no big deal. But when houses are selling for less or the market’s trending downwards, it’s a little harder to hit that target and that’s where you start to see the price reductions. So I would say it’s a little easier now than it was at the same time last year to price. Let’s look at pending listings. Now that’s again, homes that were brand new to the pending inspection or pending status on the M L Ss or homes that went from the pending inspection to pending status. So those would be homes that are closer to sold. So this isn’t just all brand new pendings, but a large percentage every single week. Our homes that were on the market now, they’re no longer on the market essentially. If we look at the same time, last year we had 1050 pending listings, more than 300 more listings, and last week we had 702.
So we had similar numbers last week versus this week, but last year we had way more houses going pending or getting closer to sold and the sold listings last year, 768. And then this year we were at 652 sold listings. Now that’s quite a bit more than last week, 548, but what we’re seeing we’re hitting towards the end of the month. So we’re starting to see more of those closings. So I’d expect that next week’s data would show us that we would have even more sales. But I think it’s interesting to look at the changes as we’ve seen interest rates climb. I think we’ve seen a couple different trends throughout the year. One that we’re having way fewer listings, and that is certainly the case. We’re also having way fewer pending sales and sales activity. Part of that is because, well, there’s fewer listings, but really the inventory numbers are still, they’re low, but there’s still plenty of houses for buyers.
It’s not like there aren’t any houses for buyers. And a lot of that’s because there’s also less buyer activity. So we’ve had a decrease in listing activity and a decrease in buyer activity. And some of that decrease in listing activity is directly related to a decrease in maybe somebody that would’ve bought, but they don’t want to trade their houses with those higher interest rates. So as we’re looking at this, I think we’re headed into the fall right now. People are going to be starting to go back to school, people are going to stop traveling for vacations given another week or two, and we’re going to start to see some buyers coming back into the market. But interestingly, I think I’ll share this. Yesterday I had some clients offer on a house in Greenwood, and I was dialoguing with this client I mentioned earlier in the video who had decided not to make a move, right?
Stayed put, he happens to live in Greenwood as well as he was telling me that, well, interest rates are higher and I’m just glad that there’s still stuff going on, but it seems like there’s a lot less buyers. And I let him know that this house we offered on yesterday in Greenwood, there were 11 offers on the house, even with 7.5% interest rates. There were 11 offers on the house. The house sold well over asking price. In fact, it was upwards of 10% over asking price. And the majority of those offers were trending in that direction. So even with higher interest rates, inventory is low enough where we’re still seeing competition in the market here, even right now as we’re speaking in the middle of the summer with people traveling and all that. But I think as we head into the fall, the inventory is a problem.
It’s a problem. And I’ve had multiple people mentioning that and we’ve been talking about that. There just really isn’t a lot out there. And so some buyers just aren’t excited about what’s available, but then what is available, if there’s a good one, everybody’s jumping on that. So anyways, that’s my thoughts for the week. I’ll let you know next week I’ll be traveling with my family and out of town, so we will not have a Market Watch video next week. And we’ll also, I guess not have one the following week because well, we’re going to be posting the Seattle real Estate market videos. So if you want to see the latest and greatest on the housing market, we’ll have that data coming out beginning of September. So again, we’re going to be taking a brief break on these Seattle real estate market watches and jumping back in early September to filming these videos again. But again, thank you so much for all of your attention and for following the channel and subscribing to the channel. It keeps me going, and I appreciate all of you, and I hope you have a great rest of the summer.
