I created a model of the official NWMLS data set that I use to pull my own customized real estate statistics, which allows me to dive deeper than the official NWMLS stats and also to pull different metrics that I think are more useful in understanding market trends (if you want to see the official NWMLS stats, click here or on the “Official NWMLS real estate stats” tab in the navigation bar to see them graphed out going back to the year 2000). You can click on the links below to open the following charts, which I update once a month:
Median home prices in Seattle proper
- This is my high-level market tracking graph–it shows the median sale price for houses, townhomes, and condos by month from January of 2012 to the present. Like the official NWMLS data, these data points are for transactions that closed in a given month; and unlike the official data, it includes houses, townhomes, and condos all separately.
- Note that “condos” for my hand-pulled data means resale, 1-story condos only (starting in January of 2014 when the new construction vs. resale field became available; prior to that the data includes all condos); this is because starting in 2019 we started seeing a lot of developers taking advantage of a loophole in the city’s backyard cottage legislation that went into effect that year and allowed them to build three units on every single-family lot in Seattle but required them to condoize the units in order to be able to sell them individually. So by the time we get to the mid-2020s roughly 30% of all “condos” in the official NWMLS statistics are actually new construction houses, which means that the official condo stats are completely useless in terms of trying to understand the state of Seattle’s condo market. My NWMLS stats page has the graph for the official data, and you can see the stark difference when you compare it to the actual condo data that I’ve pulled (side by side graph here).
- The townhome data also looks different for resale vs. new construction townhomes; you can see that comparison here if you’d like to dive into it in more depth.
- I really like this one personally, because in my opinion it’s the most accurate way to think about market activity by season for houses in Seattle (the real estate market is extremely seasonal for houses, less so for townhomes and condos, but doing a similar data pull for townhomes and condos is on my low-priority list of things to add to this page at some point).
- The data here is by season, and for each season it’s looking at houses in Seattle (no townhomes or condos) that listed within the given range, went pending within 30 days of the end of the range, and closed within 60 days of the end of the range. So it’s looking at newly listed inventory within a given time range that ends up selling within 30 days, rather than at all places that happen to have closed within the range. This is important to sellers in understanding what it looks like to list a house in a given month, as well as to buyers in understanding the difference between the official closed data (which is usually reflective of transactions that went pending a month earlier, some of which were listed that month and others of which might have been on the market for 6 months at the time they went under contract).
- Broadly speaking there are five seasons in the Seattle real estate market, each with their own seasonality dynamics that persist from year to year: Winter (January and February), Spring (March through June), Summer (July and August), September (this is a season unto itself, and by far the best month of the year for buyers as far as supply/demand dynamics are concerned as well as the best month for sellers who miss the spring and early summer window), and Fall (October through December).
- This graph shows two data points by season going back to winter of 2017: 1) ,median sale price vs. list price and 2) the percentage of houses that escalated by 20%, 10%, 5%, or by any amount over list. I’ve been running custom versions of this report in new buyer meetings for years now, and I finally decided to just plot it all out in a more organized way. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Median sold vs. list price graphs for houses, townhomes, new construction vs. resale townhomes, and condos
- These are very straightforward–they show the median sold price vs. median list price for homes in Seattle that closed in a given month, going back to January of 2012. This is a great way to see at a glance how hot the market has been at different points in time for different home types–although if you’re looking at houses specifically, I much prefer the more granular “heat meter” visualization above.
- The combo chart for new construction vs. resale is a little busy, but hopefully readable– the simple Google Sheets chart function that I use to create these visualizations doesn’t have a toggle option, so I did my best with the options that I had.
Average prices by month in Seattle proper
- This is a graph of the average monthly home price for houses, townhomes, and condos individually between 2012-2025, excluding 2020 (the normal seasonal pattern that year was pushed back by two months because of the shutdown orders, so it’s not useful for thinking about what seasonality typically looks like).
- It’s a good way to see perennial seasonal patterns graphed out over time–note that they’re much more pronounced for houses than they are for townhomes and condos.
Number of new listings by month in Seattle proper
- This is a graph of new supply entering the market by month, going back to January of 2012 and broken down by houses, townhomes, and condos separately. I prefer this metric to the total number of active properties on the market in a given month (which along with number of closed transactions is the basis of the official “months of supply” data you often see referenced), simply because it gives a much more accurate sense of what it feels like to be a buyer in a given month.
- If you look at the months of supply data you’d think that December is the best month of the year to buy a house because there’s a lot of leftover inventory from the last 6-12 months that buyers don’t want combined with the lowest number of buyers in the market out of the whole year, which means that the ratio of active houses at the end of the month to closed transactions over the course of the month (the formula for months of supply) is really high, which is great for buyers. In reality, though, the number of newly listed transactions is at its absolute, rock-bottom lowest point of the year in December, so if a buyer doesn’t want to buy any of the homes that are already on the market then they’re very unlikely to see anything else they like until inventory levels start to increase in January.
Number of pending transactions in Seattle proper
- This is the same graph as above, but for pending transactions. I explicitly choose to look at pending transactions (i.e., homes that went under contract in a given month) rather than closed transactions because when a given home happens to close is much less relevant in terms of measuring demand than when it went under contract.
Active vs. pending graphs for houses, townhomes, and condos
- This is what I like to look at in place of months of supply–it’s the ratio between the number of newly listed homes vs. pending transactions in a given month.
