September is the fourth month in a row to see declining sales activity. 

A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 7.08% this week from 6.94% a week ago, Freddie Mac reported. A year ago, the average mortgage carried a 3.14% rate. 

Mortgage rates continued to weigh on homebuyers in September, following a brief uptick in new-home sales in August.  

At the same time, mortgage applications declined 1.7% on a seasonally adjusted basis on a week-over-week basis, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. 

In Seattle, home prices posted a 9.9% year-over-year gain in August, compared to a 14.5% gain in July. Month over month, prices fell 3.9%.

Month over month in September, existing-home sales slid 1.5% to 4.71 million, which is 23.8% lower than the year before. 

New home construction missed analyst estimates in September, falling 8.1% month over month to an annual rate 1,439,000 homes, according to government statistics. 

Seattle’s year-over-year housing inventory growth was 78.7%, 10th among major metro areas.

Approximately 58% of homebuyers say they’d be willing to purchase a haunted house — and nearly 25% think they already have.

The markets cooling fastest are many of the same places that saw the biggest spikes in home prices during the last three years. 

Looking ahead, CoreLogic expects the year-over-year pace of home-price appreciation to slow to 3.5% by August 2023. 

The average median home size varies drastically across the country, according to American Home Shield’s 2022 American Home Size Index.

Washington scored well “across most factors,” the study said, and it finished second to Delaware in the overall rankings.

While 23% of residential Realtors claim they have feared for their safety while on the job, 98% reported that they have never been the victim of a crime while at work.

Sales of new homes in the U.S. jumped 28.8% between July and August, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  

Seattle had one of the highest ratios of people moving in vs. those moving out during the first half of the year, a recent analysis found.