2026 October Housing Market Update

By Matt Stark

Matt Stark is a top 1% REALTOR® in Seattle with over 19 years of experience. A Seattle native, he began his career in 1999 as an investor before transitioning to full-time real estate.

One sentence sums up where the market sits right now. The strategy that works today isn’t the one that worked last year.

The fall market across the Greater Northwest has shifted pretty dramatically, and if you’re planning to sell, that shift changes almost everything about how you approach it. I’m a numbers guy, so let me walk you through what I’m actually seeing in the October data.

Inventory didn’t taper off the way it usually does. Normally, active listings start to drop as we move deeper into fall. That isn’t happening this year. We hit about 2,225 active listings in mid-August, and instead of easing back, we’ve stayed above 2,200 all the way through the end of October.

Look at the same week last year, and there were 1,511 active listings, so we’re sitting on an increase of more than 700 homes, about 47% more inventory year-over-year. There’s no question buyers have far more to choose from than they did a year ago.

The cause is simple: more homes coming in and fewer going out. New listings are up around 6%, but the bigger story is on the other side of the ledger. Closed sales were down 18% in August, a substantial year-over-year drop. When buyer demand slows like that, homes don’t clear, and they start to pile up. That’s the whole mechanism behind the inventory we’re seeing.

For buyers, this is the most room you’ve had in a while. More listings and slower sales mean less competition and more time to decide. If you’ve been waiting on the sidelines, the balance has tipped toward you in a way it hadn’t for most of last year, with more options and more leverage at the negotiating table.

For sellers, pricing based on last spring isn’t working. This is where the shift bites hardest. I ran the numbers on how many sellers are leaving the market without a sale, and for October it was 573, counting canceled, withdrawn, and expired listings. That’s almost one in four homes failing to sell right now. The common thread is price. Price reductions aren’t a strategy; they’re a sign the number was wrong from the start, so we have to get it right on day one. Condition and presentation have to line up too. The sellers completing their sales are the ones who priced accurately and showed well from the start, and the ones languishing or withdrawing usually missed on one of those.

The open question is what happens from here. As we move into late November and that slower stretch from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, do we keep seeing this sticky inventory, or does it finally start to come down? Transactions always slow over the holidays, so we’ll be watching closely.

If you’re wondering what it takes to sell your home even in a slower season, let’s talk through a strategy for your specific property. Call or text me at 206-940-4557, email me at matt@mattstarkrealestate.com, or visit searchhomesnw.com. I’d be glad to run your numbers with you.