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Hi. I’m Jeff Tucker, principal economist at Windermere Real Estate, and this is a Local Look at the November 2024 data from the Northwest MLS.
After a blockbuster October report, this was another very strong month for the Washington housing market, especially for sales of single-family homes, and that’s the data I’ll be digging into today.
Here are the four key metrics I watch to track supply and demand in the market: closed and pending sales, which tell us a lot about demand; and listings – new and active – which tell us a lot about supply.
Closed sales of single-family homes climbed 25% year-over-year, from about 3800 to over 4700. Pending sales, which will mostly close in December, climbed a little less from last year, by 18%.
On the supply side, I think of listings as the reservoir of options for buyers to choose from: New listings, which represent the flow of new supply, were up only 2% in November, while the level of inventory in the reservoir was 18% higher than a year ago. Those are both more modest increases than we saw in October, which is a reassuring sign that the market isn’t headed for a glut.
The final key metric to check in on: the median price for those closed single-family home sales climbed about 6% year-over year, from $625,000 to $665,000. That’s slightly lower than last month, which is normal for this time of year, and indicates that price growth is not accelerating in an unusual way. That’s important because affordability is still a key concern for the sustainability of the market throughout Washington.
The strength of closed sales, as well as sustained growth in pending sales, suggests to me that October wasn’t just a flash in the pan, of buyers jumping in because the Fed cut interest rates. Rather, I think that home sales are normalizing after staying extremely depressed for much of the last two years.
Now I’ll dig into the three counties that comprise the Seattle metropolitan area, where we saw similar trends play out.
Residential closed sales jumped 27 percent year over year here in King County, which includes Seattle and Bellevue; a whopping 35% down in Pierce County, including Tacoma, and 30% up in Snohomish County, including Everett. So for the 3-county metropolitan area as a whole, that’s a gain of 30% from the same month last year.
The median sale price for those closed sales climbed a little less than last month, when it was closer to 10% annual gains. In November, closed prices climbed 4% in King County, up to $925,000; 5% in Pierce County, up to $565,000; and 8% in Snohomish County, up to $785,000.
Looking ahead, each of these counties had solid, but somewhat lower annual growth in pending sales than they did in closed sales: 15% for King County; 33% in Pierce, and 16% in Snohomish County.
After all those sales, there’s still been a healthy increase in the active inventory of homes available to buy across the metro area, with about 14% more than last year in King County; 18% more in Pierce, and 12% more in Snohomish County, for an overall metro-wide increase of 15%. That’s substantially less than the increase in October, when the 3-county area had 26% more active listings than the year before.
All in all this was another encouraging report showing a much more active market than at the same time last year all around Washington, and it’s good evidence that buyers haven’t just rushed back into hibernation even though mortgage rates rebounded a bit last month.
