Leavenworth Real Estate Update – Winter 2023

Real estate headlines grab your attention the most when they announce surreal changes in neighborhood home prices. In recent years, we have almost become numb to headlines shouting about 10 or even 20 percent price increases for Leavenworth homes.

Doomsayers and bargain hunters tend to rejoice when the headlines read the opposite. Large declines in real estate prices also make for tantalizing clickbait.

A quick glance at the Leavenworth real estate statistics for the first quarter of 2023 might lead you to believe that folks are giving away real estate in Leavenworth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, the average home sold for $726,000 and the median home price was $680,000 and these are dramatically different from both a year earlier and even a few months before.

But the real story is something else entirely.

As we predicted previously, and seen in real estate markets throughout the country, the real story is a massive lack of inventory.

In 2022, we bemoaned the lack of housing inventory and blamed it on record snowfalls that completely buried the town of Leavenworth. In Q1 of 2022, a mere 32 new listings came on the market, the majority of them in March.

Fast forward twelve months and we see inventory at just a fraction of those numbers. In the first three months of 2023, only 13 homes were listed in Leavenworth for sale.

With minimal inventory, we aren’t likely to see many sales. When a data set is small, it’s often not all that accurate. The low sales prices aren’t indicative of lack of buyer demand, but rather a lack of supply.

As we write this report in early April, the real estate market is starting its annual thaw. Houses are being listed regularly and often selling quite quickly. With only 2 months of housing supply, we expect 2023 will be a challenging year for buyers.

Elevated interest rates will likely prevent 2023 from being a record year for home prices, but we expect moderate price growth based on low inventory and moderate to strong buyer demand.

If you are considering selling your home in Leavenworth, we expect it to be a strong seller’s market once again.

Required disclaimers:

Information and statistics derived from Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Additionally, this representation is based in whole or in part on data supplied by the North Central Washington Association of Realtors or its Multiple Listing Service. Neither the Association nor its MLS guarantees or are in any way responsible for its accuracy. Data maintained by the Association or its MLS may not reflect all real estate activity in the Market.