Eastside single-family March market report: more record prices but more inventory

The numbers for how the single-family and townhome market did on the Eastside during the month of March.

Median sales price climbed again to $1,834,000. These sales are primarily from pending sales in February but they’re contrasted against signals of the Spring season and rising interest rates. I expect that median sales price will be slightly up in April but the competition will ease off even further.

Last month we cautioned that competition would continue to be fierce as the median sale was 20% over list. For sales that closed in March, competition got only slightly better at 19% over list.

Buyers, if you’ve been waiting for the Spring inventory, that patience is starting to get rewarded. 760 new listings hit the market across the Eastside, higher than both 2021 (727) and 2020 (716). Despite the highest interest rates (5.25% this week) since 2009, this is great news since it also means more buyers coming off the market to compete with.

Buyers stayed busy in March, trying to beat the interest rates we see now and put 625 homes under contract.

Sellers seemed nervous about the market and interest rates as early offers were frequent. Median days on market dropped from five days to four.

Following median sales price, the median price per square foot hit yet another high of $735. If you’re think that’s crazy and building a custom home makes more sense, read our cheat sheet on post-pandemic costs (custom built homes are $600-1200 per square foot!).

For the second month in a row, we ended with more inventory on the market than the month before. Inventory has increased three weeks in a row on the Eastside so it’s not surprising that there were 232 homes left as we moved into April.

Months of supply is a measure of how long it’d take to sell all the homes for sale. It’s great news to see that the supply doubled from February to April but we’d still sell out in 12 days…a balanced market is 6 months…