🚨 Debunking the Seattle Housing Market Panic: What the Headlines Got Wrong

While browsing Facebook this morning, I was alarmed to read about about a potentially crashing real estate market in our region, when I read the headline: "Scads more inventory fails to bring Seattle-area homebuyers off the sidelines"  Especially since this isn't what I found when recently reporting on the latest stats for our market, nor is it what we're experiencing working with sellers and buyers.

Here's a video breaking down the headline and its interesting take on the market...





Bottomline, this article does a few things to sensationalize and distort the current market:

Misunderstands Inventory
While inventory might be seen by some as the available number of homes (or product), when discussing real estate markets inventory is a well defined economic metric which contrasts buyer and seller activity to give an indicator of market balance.  It's an easy calculation... dividate number of Active Listings in a Month by the number of Sold Listings.  For instance, if there are 3000 Active Listings and 1000 Sold listings in a month, then you have 3 Months of Inventory.  Sellers favored markets have 3 or less months of inventory, Balanced markets have 4 to 6 months and Buyers Markets have 7 or more months on Inventory.

In this case, the writer used Active Listings and called it "Inventory"... which creates confusion.

Did Not Recognize Seasonality
Additionally, there was no recognition of these increases of active listings and inventory are very common every year.


Did Not Provide Greater Market Context
While active listing and inventory are rising...

• Sales Price Ratios are 102% in King and 100.5% in Snohomish
  
  
• Days On Market: 16 & 19 (and dropping)
  
  
• 32% of Listings Receive Multiple Offers
  
  
• 15% of Listings Receive Escalation Addendum
  
  
• 35% of Buyers Waive Financing Contingency
  
  
• 69% of Buyers Waive Inspection Contingency

Conclusion
Our market is experiencing significant effects of the overall economic & political uncertainty, however it is continuing to move forward at a brisk pace though in a slightly more balanced manner.