Seattle Condo February market: light at the end of the tunnel?
The numbers for what the Seattle condo market did in February are in. The median price at $450,000, down 2.2% year-over-year continues to hold well below the 2018 peak of $529,000. However, price-per-square-foot is up 2.5% year-over-year to $577.
If you were shopping for a condo in February we saw 283 new listings, the same number as January, but up 16.9% year-over-year. It is a little surprising we’d see the same number of new listings as January, but January ended up with a lot more new listings than normal.
At the end of February, there were 494 condos for sale an increase of 87% over last February (and February 2020 wasn’t yet impacted by the pandemic.) But that’s still below the ~875 we saw in September and October So if you’re wondering why condo pricing is flat, the amount of supply is definitely one of the drivers of that.
Buyers are out there though as they put 240 units under contract, up 27.7% year-over-year.
Days on market dipped slightly.
Where do things go from here? We’re working with a few condo buyers right now and it feels like we’re at the bottom and things are starting to recover. Something to keep in mind is that there is likely a lot of “shadow inventory”. What I mean by that is there are sellers on the sidelines waiting for prices to improve and as they improve they’ll sell. This will keep pricing down. For instance we had a client offer on a condo last week and lost in a 3-offer bidding war. Upon losing we learned there was a very similar unit about to hit the market and we scooped it up after a day on market for $705k, much less than the $850k the sellers paid in 2018.
