Monday NW Seattle Real Estate Market Update | June 7th, 2021

Video Transcript:Welcome to week 65 of our Monday market update. Sandra and I had some interesting open house events this weekend. But before we talk about those, Sandra, let’s talk about numbers.

I guess that’s my cue to start.

Your cue.

Listings were up this week from the previous week. We had 75 new homes come on the market which brings our total up to 155. But as we keep telling you guys, not everything is selling in a week. Of those 155 homes, 85 have been on the market for 10 days or more. We definitely had an off week for homes going under contract. We only had 46 homes go under contract versus a hundred homes last week. So that is a huge, huge difference. We had 37 go pending and nine went pending inspection. It was also a light week for closed homes. We had 36 homes close for an average price per square foot of $597. So we are almost at that $600 mark. It’ll be interesting to see when we cross over that $600. But they were on the market for eight days. And so, while I’m not concerned about the 36 homes that closed this week, what does definitely give me pause is the 46 homes going under contract. This is the lowest amount of homes going under contract that we’ve had since the third week in February. Which brings us full circle back to what Steve was saying about our conversations over the weekend. For first time home buyers, we are seeing so much buyer fatigue out there.

We are. So these clients that I met at the open house, it was a townhouse in Green Lake. They were an adorable young couple. They had just moved here from Cincinnati and they are renting, but they’ve put offers on a lot of homes and they’ve lost out. So they are experiencing buyer fatigue. And one thing I mentioned to them is, “Hey, why don’t you wait til a home has passed the review date and maybe you will not have any competition.” So, that was a suggestion. And quite possibly, maybe they would get a better price because the seller might be more motivated. So, that was my experience. And that would be my suggestion to a first-time home buyer. Maybe wait til you pass the review date when the seller is looking at offers.

Yeah, I had kind of similar conversations, again at the same townhouse the next day. Cute young couple, first-time home buyers, you know, 5% down. And, you know, they had really kind of taken themselves out of the market and I really just advocated for them to stay in it, that the second half of the year is always easier to buy because we have so much more inventory. And then of course, I reminded them about the interest rates. I mean, interest rates have been really, really stable. They’ve just been hovering right around 3% and really in the long-term, this is a great time to be buying. But I let them know that in Northwest Seattle, on average over 50% of the homes have been on the market for 10 days or more. And they were actually really shocked by that number. They had no idea that there were so many homes that didn’t sell right away. In their mind, everything sold in four days and it had multiple offers. Basically their broker wasn’t educating them.

That’s right. I don’t think that couple I met, their broker was educating them either. And Sandra and I are all about education. Educating people when you meet ’em at open houses, educating anytime we meet people anywhere. People are always curious about real estate. So if you’re curious about real estate and want some education, be sure to check out our YouTube channel for all of our educational videos and be sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel.