Post 1 of Several: The Introduction
In a previous life I was a high school English teacher, which on one hand was beautiful because teaching is a magically-unique calling, but on the other hand made for stressful grading since literature/writing is very personal and the judgement of which is inherently very biased. But math teachers? I feel like they had had it figured out, because numbers don’t lie. 1+1= 2. Period. Which is one of the many reasons I love data and data analysis and also critical analysis of data (as Mark Twain said, there are lies, darn lies and statistics).
With that in mind, we’re nearly halfway through the 2026 real estate season (where did it go?????). Which means we can take a moment to look at where we’ve been so far in 2026 and where we may be headed for the remainder of 2026 based purely on the data compared to the last two years (2024 and 2025) which were actually fairly normal years after the way up and way down years of the early 2020s.
So. How are we in the Seattle area looking in 2026 year to date, especially since the interest rates are half a point higher than predicted, inflation is higher than expected and we just ended a war that we didn’t expect at all?
The answer is surprisingly okay!!
Over the next few days I’ll be posting a series of snapshots at the 2026 Seattle real estate market compared to the past two years. At the end of the final snapshot, I’ll compile all these snapshots into one grand post.
Notes and Disclaimers: Please note that all the data is from the NWMLS for Seattle from 1/1/2024 through 6/15/2026 (yesterday). About 10% of the listings in NWMLS are double listings, meaning a single home might be listed once in one neighborhood and a second time in another neighborhood, or listed once as a house and once as a condo. This inflates the data, so these double listings have been consolidated to single listings so that each listing is only counted once. Additionally, in two instances I saw typos so corrected those (for example, someone mistyped the list price as $79,990 for a house that sold for $799,900, meaning they missed a 0 that reaaaallllllyyyyy inflated the percent-to-ask numbers for February 2024 — this was caught and corrected). I reserve all rights to whatever I write but accept no liability. I’m licensed with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Northwest, am a licensed assistant to top producing LarissaWilson.com, and these posts are informational and not meant to be solicitations if you are represented by another agent.
Contact me at RobInSeattle or RobMathison@BHHSNW.com.
Thank you!
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