Local Look: Western Washington Housing Update 6/4/2025

Here’s a transcript from Jeff Tucker’s latest Local Look video update:

Hi, this is Jeff Tucker, Principal Economist at Windermere Real Estate, and this is a local look at the May 2025 data from the Northwest MLS.

Last month we saw a sudden pullback in pending sales, and those chickens came home to roost with fewer closed sales in May. Many of these impacted closed sales originated from contracts signed—or not signed—in April, following Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when the stock market had dropped sharply and a lot of buyers paused their home searches.

Now, we’ve seen the stock market fully recover by May. And while it’s still a little too early to tell, there are indications that the housing market is also getting back on track.

So what we’re looking at here are the four key metrics I watch to track supply and demand in the market: closed and pending sales, which tell us a lot about demand, and listings—new and active—which tell us a lot about supply.

📉 Sales and Demand

Across the Northwest MLS, closed sales of single-family homes fell 3% in May from their year-ago levels, after growing 1% in April.

Pending sales, though—which are more of a real-time demand indicator—were flat from last year. That’s a promising rebound after falling 4% year-over-year in April.

📈 Listings and Inventory

On the supply side, about 13% more new listings hit the market this May, and the tally of active listings ended the month 39% higher than May 2024’s inventory. That means buyers are still seeing a lot more options than they had last spring.

There is one little glimmer of an inflection point here, which is that the year-over-year growth in inventory has finally stopped getting higher and higher month after month. So that year-over-year change was actually a little bit smaller than last month. It might be the beginning of a turning point in the trend.

🏷 Median Prices

Finally, the median price for all those closed residential sales actually ticked down slightly in the month of May from last year. It fell 1% to $677,500.

So it seems like that extra inventory and cautious buyers have brought price appreciation to a halt for now.

Putting that all together: closed sales and home prices did step down slightly from last year at this time, which we were expecting after the weak demand signals we saw in April’s data. But the pending sales data suggests that buyers started coming back in May.

🏡 A Closer Look at the Greater Seattle Area

Now we’ll dig into some details for the four counties encompassing the greater Seattle area.

Starting with residential closed sales:

• Closed sales dipped 7% year-over-year in the four-county region, led by a sharp 14% drop in King County, which includes Seattle and Bellevue.
• Closed sales dipped 2% in Kitsap County, climbed 2% in Pierce County (including Tacoma), and climbed 1% in Snohomish County, which includes Everett.

So those three counties—other than King—actually held up surprisingly well, given that all four counties had seen sizable pending sales declines back in April. Maybe outside of the core region, some of those buyers came back and closed quickly in May.

💰 Local Prices

Looking at median closed price:

• King County saw the only median sales price decline—about 1%, bringing it just below the $1 million mark.
• Median prices climbed modestly in Kitsap and Pierce Counties.
• Prices barely climbed in Snohomish County.

🔮 Looking Ahead: Pending Sales

Looking ahead:

• Pending sales dropped only 0.8% in the four-county area.
  • About 1% down in King County
  • Down 4% in Kitsap
  • Down 0.7% in Pierce
  • Up 0.8% in Snohomish

All in all, they’re basically flat from a year ago across most of the region, which is a strong indication that local market activity has rebounded a bit after that shock in April around the new tariff announcements.

🗃 Inventory Growth Continues

On the supply side, inventory is continuing to grow.

• The four-county greater Seattle area had over 8,100 active listings at the end of May—up 45% from the same time last year.

Just like in April, inventory growth is especially dramatic right now in:

• King County, where listings are up 58%
• Snohomish County, where listings are up 54%
• Kitsap County saw more modest growth—up only 8% year-over-year

📌 Final Thoughts

All in all, this report confirmed that greater Seattle region buyers did step back in April, but it gave some promising indications that buyers returned at nearly year-ago levels in May.