We hope everyone had a lovely Labor Day weekend! As expected, new listings coming on before the holiday were down, but Sellers made up for it last week! Over the past two weeks we’ve had 80 new listings hit NW Seattle. This is about what we’ve been seeing for the past month. We do expect new listings to increase in September, which is part of our normal cycle. Buyer activity has been down the past two weeks, which again was expected. This year we’ve noticed a perceptible drop of homes going under contract the week going into a holiday and the week after the holiday. I think this is primarily due to the pent-up demand from Covid restrictions and people just want to get out and travel. We expect Buyer activity to start picking up again.
Throughout August I kept mentioning that I was pleasantly surprised by the Buyer activity. Now that August stats are official in, the month turned out to be much better than we expected. In our area, August tends to be our slowest month. The number of homes going under contract in August were on par with June’s pending contracts and up nearly 19% over July. Inventory levels and new listings were also down from July. This helped make our August market stronger than originally anticipated. August inventory was down by 12%, and closed homes were up by 19%. This is all good news for Sellers. The average sold price and the average sold price per sq/ft were down in August, but not by much. The sold price was down by 1% and price per sq/ft was down by 2%. This was more good news for Sellers.
But not so good news for both Buyers and Sellers is that interest rates have been steadily creeping up for the past 4 weeks. At the beginning of August 30-year conforming rates were at 5% and as of Friday 30-year conforming rates were at 5.875%. At this point Buyers are getting used to the weekly ups and downs of interest rates. In this interest rate market, Buyers need to be in close communication with their lenders, which I believe most serious Buyers are.
We’ll be back on September 26th with our next Market Update. In the meantime, we hope everyone is doing well despite our air quality issues. The bright side is that the sunsets have been stunning!
-Steve & Sandra
𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠, 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙 𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙/𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑢𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒! 𝑊𝑒’𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑝!
Steve 📲 (c) 206-769-9577 📧stevehill@windermere.com
Sandra 📲 (c) 206-271-7100 📧sbrenner@windermere.com
🔗 Brennerhill.com
Windermere Real Estate /FN
