Seattle-area home shoppers find some signs of hope — but prices are climbing at a daunting pace

Seattle area home buyers looking for signs of hope in the scorching housing market have seen mixed results.

Prices are still rising – by 30 or 40% year over year in some areas – and homes are selling fast. At the same time, a flurry of new offers gives shoppers a little more breathing room, and local agents say they are seeing signs of cooling – albeit faintly.

“Some of my clients took a little break,” when the trip returns after the lockdown, said Sharon O’Mahony, Seattle Windermere agent. “People think they’ll take the summer off and start again in the fall.”

After a year of breakneck home price growth and aggressive bidding warfare among buyers, agents say the usual slowdown will begin in summer.

But it’s all relative. When homes go up for sale, “instead of 10 offers, they have six offers,” said Eric Gouge, Snohomish County’s agent Coldwell banker Bain.

Buyers seem to be making slightly less aggressive deals when searching for homes but are still bidding higher than list price and foregoing protection, he said. Mortgage rates have remained low and continue to attract new buyers.

“The demand is still there,” said Gouge. “It only takes two people to really get the price of a house up if they both want it.”

So far, new inventory hasn’t done much to make it affordable. Real estate prices are still setting records.

The average single-family home in King County sold for $ 860,000 in June, according to data released Wednesday by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. While this was a slight 1% decrease from May, the median price in King County marks an increase of nearly 19% from last June and a 24% increase from the same point in time in 2019.

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In Pierce County, the median price of $ 516,000 is up about 26% year over year. In Snohomish County, the median is up 32% from $ 716,000. Both courses rose from a month earlier and set new records.

In more than two dozen districts in West Washington, fewer than a quarter of the homes listed for sale in June were below $ 400,000, according to NWMLS. About a third was listed at $ 800,000 or more.

Areas across King County have seen large double-digit price increases since last June. The average Eastside home sold for $ 1.36 million last month, up nearly 40% from 2020.

In North King Counties, including Shoreline and Lake Forest Park, the median of $ 925,000 was 42% higher than last year.

When Ben and Kendra Thew started looking for a house in Edmonds earlier this year, they found themselves in the heat of the market.

Both therapists, the couple, were looking for additional bedrooms for private home offices, a garden for their young daughter, and walkways for walks in the neighborhood. They made between 10 and 20 offers, “always feeling like this will never happen and feeling completely dejected,” said Ben.

“Inventory may have increased, but demand was still very high,” said Kendra.

The couple paused when they found a four-bedroom home that had been in the market for “eight full days,” Kendra said. They secured the house for $ 875,000, just below the list price of $ 900,000.

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King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties had more new homes for sale in June than any month since May 2019. And there were even more homes available at the end of the month than May, suggesting buyers had, and perhaps, more choices a little longer for shopping.

Still, that may not feel like a huge relief to home shoppers, as there were far fewer homes for sale at the end of the month than at this point in 2019 or 2020 and demand is not diminishing. Across the Puget Sound region, given current demand, it would take two weeks or less to sell all of the single family homes for sale.

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The pandemic-era reluctance to live in urban condos seems to be easing. Seattle sold more than twice as many condos in the last month as it did in June 2020. (Those sales likely came about a month earlier.)

The average price of a condo in Seattle is $ 499,995, 9.5% higher than last year.

In the case of single-family homes, the feverish market last year caused some sellers to overpriced their homes only to receive few or no offers in the past few weeks.

O’Mahony said she is seeing occasional price drops in offers and buyers getting cheap deals on townhouses.

Seasonality is normal in the market, with the summer months usually showing some decline. It’s too early to say which trends will last.

“It might just be a rash we’re feeling right now,” said O’Mahony.

The region is still a long way from becoming a buyers’ market.

On a national level, “the market is going from scorching hot to just hot,” said Taylor Marr, senior economist at Redfin. “Seattle is in line with this national trend, but it’s still hotter than the rest of the country.”

In the first half of this year, more than 4,500 homes in the Seattle area, including Bellevue and Tacoma, sold for $ 100,000 or more above list price, according to Redfin. That was a huge jump from around 380 in the same period last year.

While the 2020 numbers are likely to be skewed by the pandemic, the big difference underscores the competition insolvent buyers have faced for months.

Doug Fox and his wife planned to retire in a couple of years and sell their completely remodeled three-bedroom Bellevue home, but this year “the market was doing a lot better than we expected” so they made the move for sale, he said.

Potential buyers toured the home one at a time, some bidding $ 200,000 above list price and others going even higher, he said. The house ended up closing for about $ 1.65 million last month, $ 403,000 above list price.

“We were stunned,” said Fox.