Snohomish County sees 35-percent increase in home sales

They should just put up the ‘For Sale’ signs with the ‘Sold’ placards already attached.

Or that’s what it feels like.

Snohomish County saw a 35-percent increase in closed sales year over year for the month of April, according to numbers released on Tuesday by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

A total of 1,272 homes closed compared with 943 the year before.

“What’s available and that looks at least ‘pretty good’ is selling,” said Dick Beeson, an MLS director and principal managing broker at Re/Max Professionals in Tacoma, in a statement.

The median sales price in Snohomish County also made a jump. Last year, the median sales price for a home was $296,000 in April.

This year, the median price for homes was $335,000 or an increase of 13.18 percent.

Both condominiums and single-family homes sold at a brisk pace — 38.55 percent closed sales for condos and 34.03 percent for houses, according to the numbers.

The number of pending sales also was much higher year over year. Last year, there were 1,454 pending sales for the county for April. That went up to 1,747 this year.

“Long building pent-up demand is being unleashed,” said Ken Anderson, managing broker and owner of Coldwell Banker Evergreen Olympia Realty, in the statement.

For the four-county Puget Sound region, real estate agents logged 8,671 pending sales to top the 8,000 mark for only the second time in the past 16 years.

The only thing that was down was the number of available listings. Home owners put 1,702 properties on the market in Snohomish County in April, up from 1,591 homes a year ago.

But the total number of listed properties for the county dropped from 2,237 listings a year ago to 1,937, or a decrease of 16.76 percent.

It’s the same story around the Puget Sound region where the total number of listings was down 15 percent from a year ago, or a drop from 21,390 homes to 18,132 this year.

“We are still very clearly in the midst of a seller’s market and unless we see a significant increase in listings, it will remain that way for the forseeable future,” said OB Jacobi, president of Windermere Real Estate, in the statement.