Seattle’s Morning News: Cool weather brings calmer housing market

As the weather cools off, so does the housing market in Western Washington.

Windermere Chief Economist Jeff Tucker told the “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio Tuesday the housing market is following a typical pattern.

“This is a pretty predictable outcome, every year after we get past the peak spring selling frenzy,” Tucker said.

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Tucker said while you will pay a little less from a few months ago, home prices are up overall. He said in King County, the median sale price for a family home is up $50,000 from last September, jumping from $900,000 to $950,000.

Tucker added that if interest rates go down, demand could go up and prices along with it.

However, Federal Reserve rate cuts caught the attention of buyers.

“So that did seem to catch homebuyers’ attention,” Tucker said. “If you look at Google Trends for searches of the word mortgage or mortgage rate, they spiked as soon as the news came out that the Fed was cutting the short-term rate by half a point. So I think that is a moment now where buyers are kind of tuning back in. They’re learning that interest rates have come down a lot. They’ve come down from about seven and a quarter, seven and a half percent, as recent as April or May of this year, down to about six and a quarter right now.”

He believes the back-to-office trend is increasing demand in King County by “bringing some folks a little bit back toward the central core of the region.” However, Tucker said that trend is “working against a bit of a trend of softening in the tech labor market.”

He explained there was a huge tech hiring boom in 2021 for jobs such as data scientists and software engineers. Tucker said that boom peaked in 2022 and has since calmed down.

“So that is a bit of a headwind for our region, but that is being balanced by, if they’re maybe not hiring at quite the same frantic pace, but they’re telling folks, it’s not even just three or four days a week, you need to be back in the office five days a week,” he said.

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Another trend Tucker noticed is that fewer people are viewing their first home as a starter home.

“I think when they buy that first home, they’re sort of thinking, ‘This is not going to be my starter home that I’m expecting to sell in three or four years to move up,'” he said. “It seems like a growing trend of people saying, ‘I want to sort of do this one and done. Well, look at the price. If I’m going to buy a house, I’m going to be settled there for a long time.'”

Contributing: KIRO Newsradio staff

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Julia Dallas is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read her stories here. Follow Julia on X here and email her here.