November Condo Report: Sales Flat, Prices Up!?

Yesterday Redfin released data on what happened with the Seattle Area market in November showing that for the city of Seattle the median condo price increased 6.1% to $303,320, sales were flat at 138 sales and inventory declined 10% to 1,102 homes on the market at the end of the month.

Median Price Up 6.1%

The median price for condos in Seattle was $303,320 in November. Surprisingly, this is up 6.1% from October. Year-over-year median price is up 8.3%. At this time last year it was $280,000. As a condo owner, I’m pleased to see this!

Sales Flat

I’m surprised to see that sales in November, 138, are basically equal with October which had 137 sales. In fact, since there are typically a handful of late reported sales we’ll likely see November numbers settle above October. However, this is down 53.3% from last year when there was 282 condo sales in November, but that was likely buoyed by the first-time buyer tax credit.

Inventory Continuing To Decline

As for how many condos are for sale, what we refer to as inventory, it decreased 5.2% to 1,331 and is flat year-over-year. Last year at this time there was 1,335 condos on the market.

Data by Neighborhood

Depending on how much work I have this week I’ll post a breakdown by neighborhood.

What Does the Future Hold?

Since everyone likely took two days off at Thanksgiving I expect that sales will decline in December. As for prices, it is anyone’s guess. I was expecting that prices would fall into the winter but surprisingly that hasn’t happened. As for inventory, fewer people will list their condos for sale in December than November.

We’ve also seen the sale-to-list price stay flat at 94.9%. It was 94.6% 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.