Welcome to the Market Update for Bellevue – July 2022.
It has been an interesting year so far across all markets. With the rising home values throughout 2021 and into 2022 meeting head on with the continued supply issues, rising gas prices, and rising mortgage rates, we’ve seen many opine about the health of the real estate market and the possibility of a bubble. What we have been seeing is more of a correction, or a return to more normalized levels of buying and selling. Let’s take a closer look.
Median Sales Price – 2022 started off with a continued climb in median sales price from the end of 2021. This continued through March when we started to see the early effects of the rising mortgage rates. From April’s median sales price of $2.25M the market in Bellevue has gradually declined to July’s $1.7M median sales price.
Home Sales – Early spring sales made a big jump from Q1 2022. April jumped up 19% to 113 sales. May and June were also higher than Q1 with sales of 132 and 109 homes, respectively. July has seen a big drop to 77 sales. New listings increased as well during this time. Both June and July saw 2x as many new homes listed as homes sold.
Price per Sqft – This measure is affected by many factors, as you can imagine. The range for this year has spanned $697 to $848, coming to rest at $697 in July. There has been no noticeable trend in this.
Sales Price/List Price ratio – Throughout all of 2021 we saw the median sales price of homes come in above the listing price. With the average mortgage rate never peaking above 3.18% Buyers’ mortgage dollars had more buying power. In March of 2022 is when we started to experience the less than gradual rise in mortgage rates. Consequently, the market had to react with sellers re-adjusting their expectations. As a result, we have seen a noticeable decline in the Sales Price-to-List Price ratio from 117% above list to 99.1% of list price in July.
