July 2014 Seattle Condo Stats

The MLS recently released its July stats for Seattle condo sales. As with all our market updates, first we look at Seattle as a whole from both a month-over-month comparison to previous months, as well as a year-over-year comparison. Then we break it down by the MLS area, focusing on our larger condo populated neighborhoods for a more specific look at what is going on in a particular neighborhood of interest based on a year-over-year comparison to see where things are compared to the same time last year.

July saw the total number of condo sales in Seattle increase to 256 sales, which was 5% over June and 7% over May. The year over year number of sales in Seattle, as a whole, for July was also 6% over last year at the same time.

This trend seems to be fairly consistent within the urban core neighborhoods in this report. From a pricing stand point, we did see median sales prices come in higher than the same period from last year in all the areas, except for area 390 which includes Capitol Hill. It’s medial price for July was $282,000, which is 6% below July of last year. This dip might be making up lost ground though because Capitol Hill was showing increases over last year’s numbers earlier this spring and summer, so this might just be a temporary slowdown on price increases.

We also saw a decrease in the number of new listings coming to the market in all of the MLS areas in this report except for Downtown/Belltown (area 701). Some of the increase in this area can be accredited to Insignia Towers’ new construction community as they have brought many new listings to market. And those new pending and active sales count towards the total of listings coming to the market. Insignia posted 24 new listings total in July, of which 13 of those went straight to pending.

We’ll see what happens to the number of listings and prices after Labor Day, where we usually see a bit of bump in activity and sales in our condo market once buyers, sellers and brokers are done with summer vacations and travels.