Seattle Real Estate Market Watch – 9/19/2022

Hey Y’all, Zach McDonald, your real estate agent with Real Property Associates. And this is my Seattle Real Estate Market Watch for September 19th, 2022.

Last week we saw the similar trend that we’ve been seeing here over the past almost two months now, where we’re seeing more listings coming on the market and selling than we are new listings. So we’re having more pending sales than new listings. Again, this trend’s been going on pretty much since we started these market watches a couple months ago, and I mentioned I think the market has been stabilizing here in the Seattle area over the past couple months, and this theme just continues. Now again, interest rates have been super volatile and they’ve been shooting up here recently. They dropped down below five briefly about a month ago, and now they’re back well over six. And last week Freddie Mac released their primary mortgage survey and they do this every single week. And as of September 15th for that week, their average rate was over 6%.

And this is the first time we’ve seen that since 2008. So a 14 year high in their primary mortgage market survey. Now we follow the mortgage news daily numbers as well. And last week and as of today, even 6.42% was the rate the going rate here as of this morning Monday nine 19. So we’ll probably see these numbers even higher for the, for the following week here. but again, rates haven’t been this high in quite some time. And I think it’s important just to pause here briefly and talk about rates because I see people commenting in the comments about rates and rates are definitely higher and we’ve seen them trending higher recently, but historically rates have been closer to 8% in the upper sevens historically since Freddie Mac started doing this survey. And if we look at rates here in the last year, they’ve shot up.

So last year September 16th survey 2021, the fixed rate 30 year mortgage was locking in at 2.86%. All right, and last week on 9 15 6 0.02%, up 3.16%. That’s a huge jump right in rates. But again, historically speaking rates have been quite a bit higher. And if you look back over the last 10 years, rates are high right now and we’ve seen rates kind of in the mid to upper fours, even bumping into the fives at times. But then a lot of times kind of in the low force and over the past few years we saw rates dropping even lower into the threes and even into the twos at points. And so again, our recent reference is that rates are super high right now and they are for the short term, but not over the long term. We’ll throw one more graphic up here. I think it’ll be helpful if we look at the historical rates here.

This is also from Freddie Mac survey and I love their data. It’s super helpful. It’s a little bit outdated by the time we get to look at it, right? Cuz rates are changing every single day. It’s like looking at stock market data from the week before when you’re in the current week. But if we look over their historical numbers here, I think it’s helpful and this one has the different recessions overlaid on it. All right? And then what we see here as, as we’re nearing a recession, and for those that aren’t familiar, the government has not officially said we’re in a recession yet, but if we’re looking at the data, really we kind of are already in one, but until it’s officially announced, I, we’re not technically in one. But if we’re looking at this data here, we’re seeing what happens to rates as we enter into a recession.

And when we’re seeing this, we’re seeing rates going up into a recession. And then again, in each instance here, once we hit that recession, we’re seeing rates drop down every single time Rates have dropped down in those recessions, sometimes they spike right back up, right? So like in the eighties they spiked right back up, but most of the time they’re gonna drop off because what we’re trying to do right now is slow down the economy, right? But what’s gonna happen after that is we need to, we need to pick it up. We need to incentivize spending. And so at this point in time, we’re trying to slow things down and we’re seeing right now rates going up, which just is a good sign that we’re heading towards a recession. Again, I think we’re already in a recession, but it hasn’t been officially announced. So at this point we’re still on that upward trend.

But I think what we’ll see, just like we have historically is once we get to that official announcement, then we’re gonna start to see rates tapering off. But that might be another six months. That might be another 12 months until it’s at that point where we’re gonna start to see rates coming down. But I do think rates coming downs on the horizon, they have trended down historically. Again, if we’re looking at this graph, you’ll see rates again historically have trended down. but then they go up in these different points. So rates are not flat, they’re very volatile, especially right now, normally not quite as volatile, but rates are different every single day, just like the stock market’s different every single day. Let’s jump back to the housing market here as we finish up this market watch. And again, I just wanted to spotlight on rates here a little bit because they are getting higher and even in recent weeks we’ve been seeing higher activity still picking up.

So this has all been going on, but we’re seeing the buyer activity picking up the stock market right now. Isn’t anybody’s favorite place to put money? I’ve had multiple people reaching out to me here over the past week that want to invest and that want to take money out of the stock market or not put more into it and want to put it into real estate. So people need to put their money somewhere. There is a lot of cash on the sidelines, but there’s also people that wanna invest their money in great opportunities, right? And I’ve mentioned that we’re in an area of opportunity. We don’t know if that opportunity’s gonna keep getting better. I think it will get a little bit better here. But what we’re seeing in our market watch is it’s not like a lot of houses are building up on the market anymore.

We saw that temporarily here in the late spring and in the summer, but we’re seeing inventory starting to get a little bit smaller. And we saw that in our last market update. And I think we’ll see that again here in the October, 2022 market update that we’re continuing to see the inventory levels go down. Essentially we’re stabilizing a little bit, right? The amount of houses coming on the market is keeping up with buyers. We’re not seeing a ton more houses on the market than the buyers that are interested in buying those houses, which keeps things kind of on a level playing field at where they’re currently at. So if we’re looking at these last couple stats here, I think another thing to point out that we saw another 210 listings canceled back on market 115. So that would be people that are taking their houses off the market temporarily to then put ’em back on.

Sometimes people are changing the prices significantly, so it kind of shows up as a new listing. I’ve talked about that if you follow this channel regularly. but a lot of those canceled listings are going back on the market at a lower price. Those wouldn’t count as new listings. So if you’re curious about that, new listings are going to be listings that are brand new or have been off the market for a whole 60 days before they get re-listed. And then the contingencies, we’re still seeing contingent purchases on the market and I think we’re gonna continue to see those contingent purchases. But what I’ve noticed over the past few weeks, we had 27 this week and we’ve been seeing a slow decline in the amount of contingent purchases. So that window’s here, but I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last.

Thanks so much for watching this week’s Seattle Market Watch video. And as we’re wrapping up, I just wanna make sure you’re all super clear. We’re looking at data from King and Snohomish County from the previous week. I didn’t mention that earlier in the video, but that is the general trend with these market watches. The idea is that we’re looking at data as it’s happening on a weekly basis, and then we come back to it and look at it in retrospect or hindsight in those Seattle market updates. So if you want to continue to follow along with these videos and others on the channel, please consider subscribing. And if there’s any way I can bring value to your situation buying or selling real estate here in the Seattle area, please feel free to reach out.