The Seattle area is in a funk — and October’s sluggish housing market reflected it.
Last month, it became cold and dark, massive layoffs hit corporate workers, the government shut down and the Mariners lost their shot at the World Series.
Well, that last one didn’t really impact home sales, but it still contributed to the general gloom.
According to Northwest Multiple Listing Service data released Wednesday, pending and closed sales in King County were down 10.8% and 8.2%, respectively, in October compared with the same month a year prior. The drop in activity occurred despite mortgage rates hitting their lowest point in a year — 6.17% for a 30-year loan.
“These rate drops were just too little too late to overcome the current economic craziness,” said Kim Colaprete, owner and managing broker of Team Diva Real Estate in Seattle.
Economic uncertainty continues to curb buyer appetite, she said, especially amid the government shutdown, which began Oct. 1 and is now the longest-running shutdown in U.S. history. Government employees nationwide and in the Seattle area continue to go unpaid.
Seattle-area real estate broker Alex Nakamoto said he tried to draw in several buyers to his clients’ homes — only to find they’d halted their searches after their government paychecks stopped.
Even government employees still getting paid are becoming uneasy, Colaprete said. Some of her clients feel less confident about buying as the shutdown carries on, similar to the way they felt when the Department of Government Efficiency was slashing jobs earlier this year.
As economic concerns snowball, people are putting off what could be the biggest investment of their life until things feel more certain.
It's almost numbing at this point,” Colaprete said. “I don't know if there's one thing in particular that impacted the market. I think that all these things, overall, have had an impact.”
Aside from the government shutdown, the local job scene has not been much brighter. New waves of layoffs in October distressed buyers. Early last month, Starbucks laid off almost 1,000 primarily corporate workers in Seattle and Kent. Then, Amazon last week laid off 14,000 workers — 2,200 of them in Seattle and Bellevue. Amazon said cuts could continue into 2026.
“If you’re a tech worker thinking about buying a house and you see your friends, your co-workers, your family being laid off … I don’t know how comfortable you are purchasing a home right now,” Nakamoto said.
With less competition, remaining buyers had time to browse — leaving homes lingering on the market. October saw 7.8% more new listings and 33% more active listings from a year ago, suggesting homes are taking longer to sell.
Still, prices in some areas continued to rise.
The median sale price of single-family homes rose 3.9% in King County from a year ago to $997,000, according to the NWMLS data. But it dropped 4.9% to $770,000 in Snohomish County and 1.7% to $570,000 in Pierce County. Kitsap County had the largest increase — 8.8% to $600,000.
Although the median sale price of single-family homes on the Eastside didn’t budge from $1,550,000, prices in Seattle rose 8% from a year ago to nearly $1,050,000.
“Our market is slow, but it is still a seller's market in some areas,” Colaprete said, adding that bidding wars were rare but still happened for desirable properties.
But not all sellers are interested in who is offering the most money. Some just want the bid offering the quickest closing.
One of her clients recently bid $50,000 under asking on a property with multiple offers. But the sellers accepted her client’s offer because they agreed to waive an inspection.
“I think there’s a lot of anxiousness for sellers if their house doesn’t sell for a week,” Colaprete said.
Condo sellers are especially eager to close right now. Buyers are even less interested in condos, which have become renowned in Seattle for still-high prices and monthly fees.
Certain parts of Seattle have skyrocketing inventory, Colaprete said. One-bedroom condos and condos in Capitol Hill are especially hard to sell right now.
“The condo market has been super brutal this year,” Colaprete said.
While median sale prices for condos in Snohomish and Pierce counties rose 3% year-over-year to $525,000 and $395,000, King County is struggling. The median sale price for a condo in King County was $550,000, down 2% from October of last year.
People who bought their condos within the last five years are barely making a profit — if any profit at all, real estate agents said.
Slower sales and more listings lingering have contributed to the Seattle area’s lowest home turnover rate in possibly decades. It also means that remaining sellers have to battle for attention — especially in the crammed condo market.
Nakamoto said his client recently sold a condo in Kirkland and only walked away with $2,000 in profit because a similar condo in the same building continued to drop its price.
“It’s like they're competing against each other to lower the amount,” he said.
Colaprete said she has to have difficult conversations with people who want to sell a condo they purchased within the last few years.
“You’re going to be selling your condo for less than you paid for it,” she tells them.
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