The Real Estate Disaster: What You Need To Know

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Michael Zuber (1:00)

How terrible is the Seattle real estate market? And now by Seattle, we mean King County, which is bigger than Seattle. And we will even touch on why. What are the things that have happened to cause the Seattle real estate market to potentially implode? Beth, we're gonna talk about August numbers.

How bad are they? Let's start with price.

Beth (1:22)

What is going on with price? So first, I wanna say that traditionally, August is one of our slowest months of the year. It's right up there with December.

Michael Zuber (1:33)

Okay.

Beth (1:33)

So it's always an off time, because in the Seattle, greater Seattle, Western Washington area, it's peak time. Like the sun's out, it's as beautiful as it could ever be. We forget about how gray and dreary it was. We're reveling in the beauty of summer.

Everyone's on vacation, outside, hiking, not thinking about moving.

Michael Zuber (2:00)

Right.

Beth (2:01)

However, we still, our data from the Northwest MLS came out just a couple of days ago, comparing August 2026 to August 2025

Michael Zuber (2:12)

Which is a fair compare, right? Two Augusts.

Beth (2:14)

Two down months compared against each other.

What have we got? Okay. One of the most interesting things I saw was, well, Seattle, so Seattle proper, within the city of Seattle, the prices are down 8% year over year. That's a significant hit. Like, that's not a blip. That's a big drop.

Michael Zuber (2:34)

Yeah. I mean, see, again, Seattle historically was almost like it was 999 forever, right? So it took an 80k hit.

Beth (2:42)

Big hit, and now it's 920 It went from a million year ago to 920 this year.

Michael Zuber (2:50)

8%.

Beth (2:50)

Big change. And then the interesting thing was, the city of Seattle had been resilient up to now, where it was kind of bucking the trend.

Michael Zuber (3:00)

Right.

Beth (3:01)

And which is interesting. It's not anymore. So it was kind of lagging, but it's catching up now.

And they are now seeing higher inventory and all of the challenges we've been seeing on the east side for a while. So east side is the other side of King County that's more higher price. The tech heavy suburbs, that is mostly what we see there. And so east side prices are down 5.97% year over year.

SPEAKER_2 (3:29)

Okay.

Beth (3:29)

And so, but countywide, it's 7% down. So kind of right in the middle there.

SPEAKER_2 (3:35)

Okay.

Michael Zuber (3:35)

All right. So again, Seattle proper down eight, King County higher in. Again, a higher end down 6% might be a bigger absolute number. Like what are the absolute numbers?

Beth (3:44)

Yeah, the absolute number. So for the east side, last year was 1,537,000. This year, it's 1,445,000.

Michael Zuber (3:52)

Yeah. So that's almost 100 grand.

Beth (3:53)

Yeah, it's a big hit. And we've been seeing, it's no surprise to agents that work around this area. We've been seeing this for a while and having some real hard conversations point. Yeah. Direct conversations with, and I think most people get it by now because everyone watches their neighborhood and sees what's going on. They see the increased inventory, they see the price cuts, et cetera.

Yeah. All right.

Michael Zuber (4:16)

So prices down 7% countywide. That's significant.

That's borderline correction territory. I put 10% as correction.

Beth (4:24)

Yeah, 10% is correction, right?

SPEAKER_5 (4:26)

Okay. Yeah.

Beth (4:27)

So active listings, there were some interesting things here. Up 27% in Seattle.

Oh, Jesus. We've been seeing a lot on the east side for a while, so I'm not surprised to see we're up 45% on the east side.