January Condo Report: Where’d the Buyers Go!?
Last week Redfin released data on what happened with the Seattle Area market in January and there are a couple surprises!
What are they? For starters, sales really dropped,. 42.4% to 88 sales, the $/sq. ft. is at its lowest point in the last eleven months, and months of supply is at an all time high.
Here’s the numbers for the city of Seattle: the median condo price decreased 4.5% to $277,000, sales were down 42.4% to 88 sales and inventory decreased 1.3% to 963 condos on the market at the end of the month.
Median Down 4.5%
The median price for condos in Seattle was $277,000 in January, down 4.5%. Year-over-year median price is down 8.8%. At this time last year it was $303,750.
I’m not too surprised prices dropped, but I am surprised that the dollars per square foot really slid:
Sales Down 42.5%
Not surprisingly sales were down in January as real estate buyers were likely not buying places around the holidays. But surprisingly, they were down A LOT.
How much were they down? They were down 42.5% to 88 sales from 153 sales in December. This is down 42.1% year-over-year. Last December there was 152 sales. Where’d the buyers go!?
Inventory Continuing To Decline
As for how many condos are for sale, what we refer to as inventory, it decreased 1.3% to 963 and is down 13.3% year-over-year. Last year at this time there was 1,111 condos on the market. This is a little surprising, the number of people of listing should be going up post holidays. However, I’m not surprised because it felt like I didn’t see a lot of new listings hit the market. And what hit the market was re-listings.
Months of Supply Skyrockets
We’ve also seen the sale-to-list price tick up to 96.2%. It was 94.4% in December.
Data by Neighborhood
Wondering what your neighborhood is doing? Check out Redfin’s spreadsheet with all the details. For many neighborhoods you’ll find 12 months worth of data.
What Does the Future Hold?
Honestly, I’m not too optimistic about a sales increase next month based on the lackluster inventory.
What Do You Think?
Have you been shopping for a condo recently? What do you think of what’s available for sale? Made any offers? How did those go?
Redfin has a spreadsheet available if you want to dig into the data for for a neighborhood or city not included here (or for single-family home and townhouse data.)
Disclaimer: I work at Redfin and run the marketing team. This is one of the projects my team works on.
