Seattle Housing Market Update – December 2025

Hello, Seattle homeowners. Let's get into the December statistics. I am in a great mood today. I just put two houses under contract with mutual acceptance in the last 24 hours. So I have been very busy, but it is great, especially for this time of year, December. I've got two or three sellers lining up for launching their homes in the next couple of months as well. And I've got some commercial buyers, some condo buyers, all sorts of things are going on. So even though traditionally you may feel like December is a slow time of year for Seattle real estate, things are continuing to go well here on this little N equals one experiment of my business. That being said, I am very small sample size. So I want to dive into the greater MLS statistics so we can hear what's really going on. I look at Twitter all the time. I would say that's the social media that I'm addicted to. And there are a couple of people that I follow that are so bearish on the economy. Like I often will look at their tweets and then I will make a reel to respond or something just because there's all of this doom and gloom about more people going into default on car loans, on student loans, less affordability for first time home buyers, stock markets in an AI bubble that's about to explode. Microsoft is about to leave the state because of all the Washington state employer taxes that they target toward big businesses like Microsoft and Amazon. So it's been a depressing last couple of weeks on Twitter and I missed my November market updates. I want to come back and share and look at together what's really happening in the real estate market so we can see if Twitter's got it right. If my busy little business has got it right somewhere in between, what can you expect if you are thinking about entering the housing market, especially coming out of Christmas, going into the new year? A lot of buyers start looking in like they set their little New Year's resolution in January and they start looking and there are no houses. Usually I tell people the market starts to heat up kind of between Super Bowl Sunday and Valentine's Day, somewhere at the end of January, middle of February. So that's when the buyers start coming out. Oftentimes the sellers are really sleepy and they don't get going until like April. So we are in a little bit of a less inventory period right now, but deals are still cracking baby. So let's see what that looks like. So right here what we have is the median home prices you can see here last January. Let's look at we actually it's December, it's beginning of December now, but we only have November data published because November finished two days ago. So that's the last data point that we have. So if we look at where we are last November, again this was an election year versus where we are now. We look at this little key over here in Seattle, we are up four percent. Median home price is up four percent year over year, but in King County as a whole we're down two percent, and Snohomish County as a whole we're down five percent. So at first blush here looking at median home prices year over year, it's not looking great. And remember last November, Trump 2024, that was an election cycle for the presidential election which usually depresses the market. And so that was an especially slow time of year. A lot of listings started expiring. Usually we make up for that in the spring, and this spring we had tariff news and other things. We didn't have quite as much of a launch as a lot of us were expecting to kind of make up for things. That being said, you know we did, here's the spring, April, June, you could see that we peaked here in Seattle median home prices at $9.16, beating any throughout the year median home prices for the last three years here going back into the COVID times. If we look at this a little bit longer, we're still above, or at least in June, we were still above the peak in any of the COVID times, including over the last five years. So I don't want you to feel like the market is dead. As of June it was the best it's ever been, but at the same time it's pretty soft right now, and it's softer than it was last year during the election. Part of the story is this year we've had more homes for sale. So in the past we had this lock-in effect from the very low interest rates, and now as we get farther away from COVID, interest rates have been normalized in the 6% range for a longer period of time. Fewer people are choosing to remain locked in, and more people are like, I gotta move on with my life, I gotta sell. So this year we had in May a lot of inventory, a lot of new listings going on the market, and typically we have a little bump in autumn, and then it's slower in the dark months of the year. So we had more new listings this year than over the past two years ever since interest rates got cranked in 2022. That being said, did they sell or did they stay on the market? And they stayed on the market. So we are here higher. This is showing us how many homes are for sale, what's the inventory, how many homes are on the market. And you can see over here on the key, Seattle up 35%, King County up 30%, Snohomish County up 33%. So this is not just the number of transactions, this is not just the number of new listings offered, this is how many are sitting on the market on the MLS at any given time for buyers to choose from. Buyers have 30% more options than they did before. What do we know about supply and demand? When demand stays the same and supply goes up, then prices naturally have to come down as a result. So we have an overabundance of supply and a static or reduced demand. There's a mismatch there pulling down at the prices. In terms of homes going under contract, we're still staying right about where we have been. We peaked here 2,500, 2,500, 2,500 on the King County line. So that's stayed relatively stable. And here in November, you can see that we were even up 5%, 10%, 5% year over year. So people are putting more homes under contract, but they're just not keeping up with the number of new listings and the number of homes sitting out there. The other thing that we're seeing is that homes are falling out of contract. So even if you put something under contract, you later have a problem with your inspection. You later have a problem with your financing. These deals are going under contract, but they are not closing. So we have had a downturn in activity. If you look at this, we're down 14%, 15%, 16% on the number of closed sales year over year. So with pending, which means going under contract, we were up 5% to 10%. With actual closings that made it all the way, the 30 days from the contract to the close, we are down. So this is a significant factor, meaning either buyers are not as well qualified, buyers are choosing to walk away and lose earnest money or buyers are getting out with more contingencies. Remember during COVID, everybody was making their earnest money non-refundable. Everybody was very well underwritten. People were buying for cash. There were a lot fewer ways to get out of a deal if you didn't want to close it. Now, buyers have a lot of contingencies and protections and they're being more picky. Maybe they have a property under contract. They're doing the inspection. They see a beautiful pink house down the street that they like even better. They can say, ah, I reject this inspection. Done. Get their earnest money back and go put an offer on that pink house instead. So again, because of the larger elevated amount of inventory, we are seeing less stickiness to the deals. The deals are not staying put together once they're sold by the realtors. Let's take a look at days on market. This tells us how long it takes to get a property sold during COVID. Again, five days was the norm because you're giving people extra time. You could have offers coming in on the first day, the second day you're like, no, no, let's wait. Let's give it at least a weekend. So everybody has a chance to see it. And then we can get multiple offers. Now, although we certainly did see multiple offers in many cases, maybe 30% of the homes in Seattle in the spring markets for the most part, we're seeing longer days on market. So let's look in February. Median days on market was seven or eight days in King County in Seattle, two weeks in Snohomish County. Now started going up in the summer. Summer is usually when we slow down after the spring market. And we were seeing homes on average selling in about three or four weeks rather than one or two weeks. And if we look at the average, it's even higher. Median means half sold faster, half sold slower. Average means if there are some that take a really long time to sell, and you know, some people are sitting out there five or six months and letting their listings expire, canceling their listings because they want to sell at a certain price that the market doesn't support and they can't get it sold, but they keep it on the market, hoping that someone will come along and pay a little more. Are people getting a full price for their property? Well, in this case, we're starting to see a little drag. We are seeing, it's not terrible. The median here is people are selling for two or 3% less than their full asking price. That doesn't mean you should overprice it because you're going to get 97% of whatever you price it at. It just means that we're seeing more offers that are coming in a little bit lower. Again, if buyers see houses sitting on the market for a long time, they're not selling, sellers are stressed out, they're more likely to take a lower offer. And remember, if you overprice your home, you're a seller that's more likely to be in that position. If you price your home right, I have a townhouse that I've been selling that the buyers really took my advice on the pricing and we did get an offer on the first day. It was a lowball investor type of offer, but we had two or three people sniffing around and saying that they were going to be offered. So we were countering back with some people. We were verbally countering because we didn't want to lock the property up with this guy if we also had this guy sending something in. So we were doing phone negotiations. We had enough people interested and kind of sniffing around, but the buyers were on the fence. They were like hesitant to put in their offer and say, yes, I'm going to buy it. It's kind of like a game of chicken. And I had this happen with another property I had on the East side as well. So buyers are just taking longer, looking at more houses, sitting on the fence. They don't feel pressure to act quickly. When they do act, they're often coming in more aggressive with lower offers. With one of these verbal offers, I had to have them put in three separate offers to bring their original lowball offer up to a place that the seller would sell it. But I was able to do that because they said no talking to these other people. So anyway, a lot goes into that. You really don't want to overplay your hand. You need to know where you stand in the marketplace. And the best way to do that is by gauging other buyer interest and having other interested buyers. If you're overpriced, you have no interested buyers, you have no leverage in the negotiations. You're just a sitting duck waiting for somebody to come and offer you a pittance for the home. It's how it feels a lot of times. And how long does it take to sell? Well, you need to get about 10 people through the property. And this is similar levels to before. When we were having 50 people through the property, that wasn't because they weren't selling. It was just because we were getting, you know, multiple offers, there weren't enough homes to choose from, etc. But over the last couple of years, we tend to get more showings in the spring and times when the market is busy, especially early spring when the buyers are out, but the sellers haven't entered yet. But typically, 10 is a very reasonable average of, you can get 10 showings in your property. But I like to tell people, look at this, I say, okay, you need to get 10 people through your property. And then we look at the days on market and we say, you know, it should sell in 20 days on average. Okay, so if we need to get 10 people through your property in 20 days, once we list it, we count, you know, are you getting somebody in there every two days? In a seven-day week, you should have three or four showings. First week, you should have four because usually it slows down over time. So if we are not hitting those milestones, that means you're not getting enough interest, you're likely overpriced, or it's not selling, you know, what they, they don't like what they see when they look at it online. So these types of statistics are very useful to boil down your data and see exactly what's going on in your marketplace as you decide to enter the market as a buyer or a seller. So this is the general kind of Puget Sound update here. If you want me to drill in for your zip code, if you're thinking about doing something, I'm happy to just let me know in the comments or visit me on my website and let me know on the contact page. I'm happy to put out something more specific. You lots of different property types to choose from. We can make this be what's most helpful for you. Let's see what our takeaways are. What I'm seeing overall, the big trends are we have more inventory on the market, which means prices are a little bit softer, buyers have more negotiating power, and sellers, when you enter the market, you want your home to be really well prepped as well as really well priced. It's a price contest and it's a beauty contest right now. Second, buyers are taking their time. They're looking around. They're not feeling as much buying pressure, which is what buyers have been asking for in the Seattle area for years. So if you are a buyer and you would like to be able to take your time and not feel rushed, you would like to be able to ask your seller to potentially cover closing costs. You would like to potentially have a negotiating experience that involves paying less rather than more than the asking price for the property. This is a great opportunity for you to enter. It may not stay this way next spring. I can't promise you that will happen, but that is where we are right now. And then the other thing to really look at is whether or not your deal is going to stick together after it's gone under contract. So we have 30% more inventory. It's taking 30% longer to close and we have less closings taking place compared to the pending deals. Having a great realtor is important. Understanding your leverage and your position in the marketplace is really important and strategy matters more than ever. So if you're looking for a great deal, this winter is the time to go shopping. If you're looking to sell at a premium, this winter is the time to be prepping your property to go live in the spring. I am taking appointments and looking at my board. I've had a couple of prep appointments for people who are going to be selling the spring. I have time for more in my calendar. So if that's something I can do to help you, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, thanks for watching. Please subscribe and I'll look for you on the next video.