Puget Sound housing market features more homes, steady prices, and a ‘tale of two markets’

The housing market in the Puget Sound region this spring looks nothing like it did a year ago. Housing supply has surged 28.4% across Washington, climbing to 18,563 active listings, according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS).

“Even though our market had a slower start out of the gate, it has been chugging along,” Anton Alexander, a real estate broker with Elev8 Group at Compass, said. “It is slowly but consistently maintaining just enough momentum to keep things moving.”

Alexander described the current landscape as a “tale of two markets,” where well-prepped, accurately priced homes still draw fast offers while overpriced listings can sit for weeks or longer.

“Over 50% of homes are still selling in the first 10 days on market,” he said. “The listings I’m watching sit are not sitting because of the economy. They’re sitting because the opening price didn’t match the market’s current temperature.”

Regionwide, closed sales fell 3.7% year over year in April while the median price held steady at $650,000. The Puget Sound area tells a different story. Snohomish County posted a 58% inventory increase — the largest of any county in NWMLS — while its combined median price for homes and condominiums dipped slightly to $750,000. The median price for a single-family home in King County was down 6.8% to $960,000. Pierce County bucked the trend, with its median sales price climbing 4.5% to nearly $580,000 for homes and condos.

Alexander said some of the hesitation among buyers is tied to the recent wave of tech layoffs, with tens of thousands of positions cut across major employers since the start of the year.

‘Not everyone feels secure right now’

“Being that we’re a tech city, it definitely sends jitters through the market,” he said. “Not everybody feels secure right now. People feel like they need to be a little bit more conservative financially.”

But he argued the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Billions of dollars pouring into artificial intelligence infrastructure are creating high-paying jobs in Seattle and Eastside communities like Bellevue and Kirkland — demand that has kept million-dollar-plus markets relatively stable.

“I do think we’re in a sort of a K-shaped economy,” Alexander said. “A lot of the consumer pressures that we hear about are affecting a different segment of the market than those that are necessarily driving our local real estate.”

Mortgage rates have added another headwind, climbing roughly half a percentage point in April after earlier signs of easing, driven by renewed inflation fears tied in part to the conflict in Iran. Current rates for a 30-year fixed mortgage stand at 6.3%.

Still, Alexander said his pending data shows the Seattle market gaining traction heading into May, with average days on market trending toward 25 days, down from 29 in April.

“So far, we have not seen numbers that suggest a crisis,” he said. “We’re seeing a market adjusting.”

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