Shattering the record books. The Seattle condo market update, February 2025
Welcome to the latest and greatest edition of the February 2025 Seattle condo market. Our first report of 2025 that contains 2025 data! As always, to skip right to the stats you can do so by clicking here though I'd strongly encourage reading on. Let's go!
As the subject indicates, January 2025 set a new record for the median sale price of a Seattle condo. Let's be frank, it blew any previous record out of the water. The median sale price of a Seattle condo registered $689,975 last month, besting a previous record of $606,000 in September of 2024. In fact, there have only been 3 months where the median price has EVER eclipsed $600,000 or more. For a new record to best its previous by almost 14% was definitely unexpected.
Now, to be fair, those of you who have been following my reports know that these stats are not a true representative of the condo market because they include the new-ish condo-ized units that function more like townhomes or single family homes. For a more consistent look, see the chart below.
What I've done to create the graph above is to isolate condos to only the 1 story variety. This removes the condo-ized units from our equation. To be fair, there are traditional condos that have more than 1 story (townhome style condos), but they're pretty rare. This graph is a more pure look at the condo market, IMO.
As expected, the median sale price really hasn't fluctuated too much over the last 5 years. Isolating only the month of January, 2025 was the second highest level we've seen over the past 5 years, only second to 2024.
Despite the sensational headline surrounding the median sales price, it was the inventory statistic that really surprised me.
Historically, January is the low point for inventory. Same goes for the SFR market. The market is pretty depressed after Halloween. Not only is there a lack of any new inventory coming to market, but buyers are also disengaged. The weather also doesn't help making it pretty unconducive to tour properties when it's dark by 4pm, cold, and there are lots of vacations planned given the time of year. Because of that, it makes sense that we enter January at ground zero as far as available inventory goes.
Yet January 2025 saw WAY more active listings than any other January going back to 2019. However, when I extract the condo-ized units and only leave room for the traditional 1-story condo, the stats are mostly the same, but not as dramatic.
In my report on the single family market, I focused on the percentage of townhomes that are representing a larger and larger share of the total single family market active inventory. Are we possibly seeing the same thing in the condo market? See below:
Visible in the far right column is proof that traditional 1 story condos are experiencing a declining share of total sold condos. This is especially true from 2023 on as affordability for traditional condos has been disproportionately harmful for buyers compared to their condo-ized counterparts. Once we see continued stabilization with mortgage rates, this will be interesting to monitor.
With interest rates and rapidly increasing HOA dues, traditional condos will continue to be a struggle from an affordability standpoint. Even outside of those factors, homeowner associations are also struggling to keep up with rising insurance costs and overall inflation where special assessments might become more common place. This is the void condo-ized units can potentially fill.
Onto the stats!
For January 2025 the median sale of a Seattle condo was $689,975, an all time record. This was up 28.4% YoY and up MoM from $550,000. Inventory was still up big time. 51.9% YoY and the months of inventory rose to 4.37 months from 2.98 in December.
Onward!
