Eastside single-family January market report: median price drops as price per square foot peaks…again
The numbers for how the Eastside single-family and townhome real estate market did in January are out.
Buyers will be thrilled to see the median sales price drop off of the record high of $1.65M in December by over $100k. It’s still over $1.5M! Prior to 2021, prices on the Eastside would rise in the first half of the year and taper off in the second half. 2021 threw that out of the window and prices steadily climbed through out the year with only a few dips. Given the record demand for homes and increasing mortgage rates, I’m expecting price increases to level off in the second half of the year.
Even though median price dropped in January, median price per square foot hit yet another record high at $662. That’s the fifth month in a row of new peaks. Buyers are moving down price brackets to be able to compete and win homes.
Competition continues to be fierce as percent of list price jumped back up to 112%. Anecdotally, this seems remarkable that it’s not higher but this is based on homes that went pending in December. I’m guessing that this will increase again next month.
Buyers put 263 homes under contract in January vs 339 pending sales in January 2021. Likely sellers continue to debate listing their home to take advantage of the competitive market while not being sure they can find or afford the next home.
Sellers that did get their home on the market did very well, mainly due to only 297 sellers getting their homes listed. That’s 19% fewer listings than we saw in January 2021…hopefully we see the 400+ listings we saw in February of last year.
At the end of the month, we had just 74 homes for sale which is surprisingly up from the lowest we’ve ever seen, but not by much…
Months of supply is a measure of how long it’d take to sell all the homes for sale. We’re at the third month in a row at an all-time low – 3 days!
