Seattle single-family June market report: median price drops $30k, but will drop a lot more soon
The numbers for what the Seattle single-family and townhome real estate did in June are out. The headline is that the median price dropped $30k to $965k from $995,500. But is up 9% over the median price in June 2021. But don’t be fooled, the median price is going to come down fast as inventory is increasing while the number of homes buyers are putting under contract is decreasing. Why the divergence? It is primarily driven by interest rates, now at 5.65% after hitting 6.28% (recall that we started the year at 3.41%.
Here’s a deep dive into all the numbers.
In June we saw 1,305 new listings in Seattle, 223 more than we saw in May. Other than May 2019, it was the busiest month for new listings in the last 12 years. This is good news for buyers who have been starved for new listings over the last year but bad news for sellers who now face more competition.
So sellers were busy listing their homes for sale, what about buyers? Buyers were much less busy putting only 750 homes under contract. This is a reasonable decline from May when buyers put 902 under contract.
With over 1,300 new listings hitting the market and only 750 going under contract it is no surprise that the number of homes for sale in Seattle has jumped a lot – we ended June with 911 homes for sale.
And so it is no surprise that with inventory increasing, so are days on market. I expect that very soon we’re going to see days on market get a lot longer.
Likewise, homes aren’t selling for nearly as much over list price as they used to.
In June there were 836 closings, down just a touch from May. June closings are mostly from homes going pending in May.
With the inventory of homes for sale growing, and buyers’ interest waning due to higher rates, it isn’t surprising that the months of supply, a measure of how long it’d take to sell all the homes for sale, is increasing. But we’re still far from a balanced market! (A balanced market is considered to be 3 months, which we haven’t seen in ten years!)
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