October Condo Report: Prices down 15.3%, Sales Down 29%

Last week Redfin released data on what happened with the Seattle Area market in October showing that for the city of Seattle the median condo price decreased 15.3% to $276,500 erasing last month’s 9.5% gain and then some. Median price was also down year-over-year, 11.1%.

We were wrong about the number of condos sold, we thought sales would be flat this month but it in fact decreased 29% to 122 sales. We thought sales volume was stabilizing but apparently not!

As for how many condos are for sale, what we refer to as inventory, it decreased 5.8% to 1,204 and is down 7.0% year-over-year.

Data by Neighborhood

Depending on how much skiing I do this weekend I’ll post a breakdown by neighborhood.

What Does the Future Hold?

As everyone gears up for Thanksgiving and Christmas sales will continue to decline, prices will also continue to decline in response to the declines we’ve seen in sales volume/demand, and fewer people will list their condos for sale.

Seeing as the months of supply, the measure of how many months it would take for all the current homes for sale on the market to sell, is increasing (homes are coming on the market faster than they’re selling), I don’t think things bode well for us condo-owners. For you condo-buyers, things are looking good :).

We’ve also seen the sale-to-list price deteriorate from 97.5% in June to 95.4% in October.

What Do You Think?

Have you been shopping for a condo recently? What do you think of what’s available for sale? Made any offers? How did those go?

Redfin has a spreadsheet available if you want to dig into the data for for a neighborhood or city not included here (or for single-family home and townhouse data.)

Disclaimer: I work at Redfin and run the marketing team. This is one of the projects my team works on.