A buyer's delight? The Greater Seattle housing market update, February 2025

Welcome to the latest and greatest edition of the Greater Seattle Housing Market Update. The first edition of 2025 to contain data from 2025! Hooray! As always, to skip right to the stats, you can do so by clicking here. For more context on everything taking place in our wild local market, continue reading below.

I'll admit, when I first saw the January 2025 stats, I had to take a closer look because I was very surprised at what I saw.

Historically, every year January is the month where we see the lowest levels of inventory. Very, very few homes hit the market after Halloween, so what is on the market during those months are often properties listed in August, September, October, etc that linger before selling, if they sell at all. Therefore, when the new year turns over, we find ourselves at rock bottom for available homes. This is also exactly the time buyers start their search. This is what leads to very friendly seller conditions that persist through April or May, depending on the year.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw January 2025 had the most homes for sale of any January going back to 2019. In fact, there were 50% more homes on the market compared to January of one year ago!

But something wasn't right. Despite what the data showed, January felt very different for me and my clients. My listings, including ones that had already been on the market for months, were getting more showings than they had been months prior. My buyers were facing intense multiple offer situations every week. So why does the data suggest a more buyer friendly market? This got me thinking that perhaps the answer lies within the superficial data. What I hypothesized turned out to be exactly what I found.

See the graph above. It charts the total number of active townhomes and non-townhomes for sale in the month of January going back to 2019. Looking at the far right column, it's evident to see that, just about every year, we see townhomes taking up a larger share of total available inventory. 

To be fair, this isn't unlocking any groundbreaking discovery. In an effort to create more units, townhomes must be constructed at the expense of single family homes on big enough lots, and we've been seeing this play out for decades. Nevertheless, it's very interesting to me to show that, despite there being 2772 homes available in January 2019 vs 1820 in January 2025, the share of active townhomes relative to total active homes for sale almost tripled from 8.8% to 22%. 

It means that as more and more townhomes are constructed, buyer's are less and less excited about buying them. This isn't to imply that buyer's shouldn't be excited about buying a townhome. After all, I still own my townhome that was my very first home. However, as unattached single family homes become more and more scarce, the demand for that asset increases, and with that, the price.

This would be the reason my experiences in 2025 so far don't match what the data reflects. My buyers who have been pursuing unattached single family homes have been experiencing fierce competition. Buyers pursuing townhomes and condos, that's a very different story. 

Onto the stats:

Seattle: January 2025 median sale price of $857,500. That is a 1.3% decrease YoY and down MoM from $899,000. Inventory is up 36.4% YoY and the months of inventory statistic increased to 2.6 months from 1.42. 

Eastside: January 2025 median sale price of $1,709,000. That is a 16.7% increase YoY and up MoM from $1,545,000. Inventory is up 60.9% YoY and the months of inventory statistic increased to 2.22 from 1.24 months.

King County: January 2025 median sale price of $855,000. That is up .6% YoY and down MoM from $875,000. Inventory is up 49.9% YoY and the months of inventory statistic increased to 2.14 months from 1.28. 

The absorption metric hit it's highest reading since April of last year, but was still about 20% lower than January of last year. 

Onward!