Seattle home prices are falling faster than in any other major U.S. metro, and the shift is showing up in the numbers buyers and sellers are watching now. Single-family sales prices fell 2.5% year over year in March, even as homes took longer to move and the market gave buyers more room to push back.
The median Seattle home listing price was $776,232, but the bigger change is that people no longer have to treat every listing like a race. Chris Reis said buyers who once waived inspections in 24 hours now take 30 days and ask for repairs, a sign that the housing market has moved from panic to negotiation. That is the kind of change that can matter more than the sticker price alone.
The inventory side helps explain why. Realtor.com senior economist Anthony Smith said single-family listings rose roughly 35% over the last year, while condo and townhome listings climbed about 28%. Seattle listings usually peak in the fall, around September and October, and the 2025 peak reached 10,112 listings, up 26% from a year earlier and 45% higher than in 2022. Smith said the non-single-family share has grown sharply too, from 13% of inventory in 2016 to 37% now.
That extra supply is also slowing the clock. Single-family homes sat on the market for a median of 31 days in April 2026, up from 27 days a year earlier, while condos and townhomes reached 38 days, compared with 36 days in April 2025. Buyers are still buying, Reis said, but they are not willing to overpay, and that is forcing sellers to accept a market that looks very different from the one that sent King County prices from the mid-$600s in 2019 to over $900,000 at the 2022 peak.
Reis said rates jumped past 6% and tech hiring froze, which broke the math at those prices, but he called this a slow correction rather than a crash. He also said layoffs at Amazon and Microsoft were real but not the main force behind the turn. Seattle is still adding tech jobs in biotech, gaming and AI, he said, even if the pace is far from the pandemic boom that fed the frenzy. Crime is not the deciding factor for most buyers either, Reis said, because the problems are mostly limited to select downtown blocks and some transit lines, while the residential neighborhoods where most buyers are shopping are largely untouched by that concern.
That leaves Seattle in a market that is no longer being set by fear of missing out. Demand has not disappeared, but the balance has tilted toward buyers, and the next question is how much farther prices need to slide before sellers stop chasing the old peak and the market finds a floor. For a broader look at similar pressure across the country, see 2026 Us Housing Market Trends Show Buyers Gaining Ground as Prices Ease.
