What began as an extension of 2021’s high-flying real estate frenzy soon enough tumbled and fell to a near standstill by the Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates, rendering borrowing costs too pricy for most would-be homebuyers, who, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t bend the numbers to their will.
As rates rose, existing-home sales fell, builders pumped the brakes, price growth decelerated, and property sat on the sidelines far longer than forecasted. Real estate companies, meanwhile, braced for lean times after riding high through most of 2020 and 2021, with thousands of workers laid off and quarterly earnings reports showing losses — in some cases, to an unprecedented degree.
To better measure an immeasurable 2022, we searched high and low for the data points that drove the industry and best reflected the unpredictable year just past. While they’re not all individually fundamental, taken as a whole they paint a vivid picture of a housing market turned on its head...
‘It’s like that roller coaster where it’s going up and up and up and up. You don’t know what’s going to happen when you get to the top.’
Let’s look at several local housing markets first:
- The High’s… Early in 2022 the buzzword was “Bidding Wars” with many marveling and just how high and how fast things were going. Here we’ll show you the tops for neighborhoods like Issaquah Highlands, Klahanie and more. See the Highest price paid over asking, the highest price per Sq Ft, and over-all highest priced home sold in your neighborhood for 2022.
- The Lows: Interest rates went up, and prices came crashing down. In many neighborhoods prices were being adjusted downward by $10,000 and even $50,000 in a week. Some homes in Covington fell by more than $100,000 from list price.
- The Here and Now: We’ll show you where price are as of right now, what you can expect from days on market, and what you can do to maximize the sale of your home.
When is the best time to sell?
NOW is ABSOLUTELY the best time!
We all know that home sellers have had the upper hand for several years, but those days are behind us, and though the market has slowed, there are still buyers out there. The difference now is that higher mortgage rates and lower affordability are limiting how much buyers can pay for a home.
Because of this, I expect listing prices to pull back further in the coming year, which will make accurate pricing more important than ever when selling a home.
In Seattle I expect somewhere between 9 and 15% continued drop. (That’s around 1% per month but still much less than we saw in many cases last year.)
“As a side note remember we saw some areas literally increase by 100% in a single year during the pandemic. This is just getting things back to normal”
For the overall greater Seattle area, home list prices rose 40.6% in just over two years’ time
So, a 10%, 15%, or even 20% drop over a two-year span isn’t as significant as it might seem at first. We are just adjusting back to where they would have been if we had maintained the “Normal” 5-8% appreciation considered sustainable.
NOW is ABSOLUTELY the best time!
We are expecting an “Inverse Curve” this spring. That means along with higher rates than we have seen over the past few years, and continued worries of recession, home sellers are going to be hit with raising levels of inventory… And more competition means LOWER prices.
When is the best time to list your home if you want to maximize your investment?
People who listened last year made Hundreds of Thousands more than those that didn’t. I doubt that waiting for school to end is worth the $200,000 less in sales price than listing just 2 months earlier would have produced.
NOW is ABSOLUTELY the best time!
Currently Covington is averaging 60-120 days on market with 80% of listed homes having already done a price reduction.
If you list the first week of February that means you should sell around the end of May and Close in late June just as school gets out.
So, if you are timing for school… The time is NOW!
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