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Is a lack of business days to blame for Seattle’s slumping home sale numbers?

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Seattle’s housing prices and sales dropped in July. Does that mean a slowdown is happening or was simply due to a blip in the calendar?

Redfin has released their Market Tracker report for July and it shows a local and national housing price drop that might show that, while the market isn’t flipping anytime soon, it is slowing down.

In Seattle, the median sale price for July was $450,000, down 2.4 percent from last month, though that’s still 9.8 percent higher than July 2015.

A big part of the reason for that was the glut of homes that hit the market in July (6,254), a 6.3 percent boost from June. That number should keep rising as the number of new listings (5,755) and number of homes sold (4,992) were both significant drops from the previous month.

Seattle has only 1.3 months of supply - tied with Denver for the lowest in the nation. As a result, 52.6 percent of homes that did sell in July sold above the list price and 65 percent of offers faced competition, a 9.5 percent and 8.3 percent increase respectively.

Redfin also points out that a drop in the number of business days in July could also have had an effect on the number of home sales. In fact, July 2016 had five less business days than July 2015, which is sure to have some kind of effect.

So, we’ll have to wait and see what August looks like before we consider this an outright trend.

Redfin

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