Seattle weekly: low inventory means a fast moving market
You’d think with all the layoffs in tech that it’d be a buyers market right now, but that isn’t the case as we’re finding the market is moving pretty briskly. Turns out many new buyers have entered the market and inventory is still low even though the number of new listings per week has been increasing. We’ve only been tracking weekly active listings since October, but you can see that there just aren’t that many homes for sale right now.
As a result, we’re cautioning our buyer clients to be patient, more inventory will come, and we’re telling sellers that if you’re going to list in 2023, sooner seems better than later as you’ll have less competition from other sellers and buyer demand is strong.
Digging into the usual numbers – new listings were down 4.5% last week from the week before with Seattle sellers listing 168 new listings. Meanwhile, buyers put 160 homes under contract last week, up 24% from the week before. Mortgage rates ended the week slightly higher at 6.15% (though you can get a jumbo loan from Wells at 5% with .625 points.)
Only one new listing really caught our eye, it is a large midcentury in north Seattle listed for $3m. Though the listing that has been blowing up on Reddit is this 1,300-square-foot five-story townhouse. Also worth noting is that we’ve lowered the price of the Perkins contemporary we have listed to $1.71m.
What also caught our eye is that Mari Bellevue seems to have recently published an updated website with more info on the 20-story 138-unit project. We swung by the sales center, but it is still under construction, as is Mari; looks like they’ve poured five floors so far. Check out our video for our update.
Our first home-buying class of the year will be on February 7th, or just hit reply if you want to grab a coffee and chat one-on-one sooner than that.
P.S. While I was writing this I missed that my daughter was cutting her own hair. Oops!
