Seattle, WA Real Estate Market Update | December 2022
Who knows what the Seattle, WA real estate market will do next…
- Are we in a bubble?
- Will the bubble burst?
- How far down will prices go?
- What about the recession and inflation?
Tune in as Seattle real estate agent Emily Cressey of HomeSmart Real Estate Associates in Seattle, WA discusses the current state of the real estate housing market in Seattle, Washington. King County and Snohomish County covered.
Click to view Emily Cressey’s Seattle Real Estate Market Update Video.
Okay, it’s December. I hope you survived the snowstorm. We had power outage for over 24 hours and now we’re warming back up and back on the air. So I wanted to do my monthly market update and just share with you some of these statistics from the MLS because I think there’s a big feeling that the sky is falling and people are contacting me, worried, what do I predict and that type of thing. So I’m trying to share that with you and I’m trying to put my face here in a way that it doesn’t block the screen.
So what we are looking at is the statistics from the Northwest MSL and what they share is a statistical data from the month that just closed, which was November. It’s now the 1st of December. So the black line is King County, the green line of Snohomish County. You can see that they’re following each other very closely, and they both have had a significant downturn from the peak of the market, which was in the spring. This is very typical for our area. The spring tends to see the most buyers come out of the woodwork. A lot of people choose to put their homes on then, and that is our high season, followed by a summer slump and then something of a resurgence in the autumn.
Now that we’re getting into the holiday season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, we will be in our slowest time of year, followed then by the Super Bowl is kind of the spring kickoff, and I expect we will see, as we have in past years, kind of this change from the slow of winter into the kick of spring, and it may not be as big of a kick. We certainly saw a huge price climb last year in 2022, the spring. But interest rates were still very low. So now we’ve had a little bit steeper, we had a steep rise and a steeper drop off. But as you can see, there’s no reason to panic here.
Most of the decline that we felt so far, it was just kind of the bubble bursting from that spring market. We are still at or above similar levels to where we were at this time last year and we’re still higher than we had been for the history before that. This is a three year view. I can go to a five year view or a 10 year view to kind of put this in perspective. I guess I can’t show you, but we’re still up by higher than we’ve been. So this is not 2007, 2008 where people were forced to sell because they could not afford their houses.
People have a record amount of equity in their homes right now. So if people are selling, it’s really just a question of I’m not going to make as much money as I would have, but they’re still going to be making money. It’s not this forced to sell losing money downward spiral that we saw. So I was listening to a podcast this morning. The guy tracks real estate forecast. He thinks that, if anything, maybe a 5% softening of the market. But here in Seattle, I think we’ve seen a lot of that.
If interest rates go down into the 5% range, which they are predicted to do next year, I think we’ll continue to see strong interest from buyers. We have a huge millennial demographic of buyers who are still out there and still looking. It’s really just a question of affordability. So once we see some relief from interest rates, I think we’ll see renewed interest in the buyer market. So if you have any questions, reach out to me. I’m emilycressey@homeproassociates.com. Until then, we’ll see you on the next monthly market update.
