Seattle’s ‘shaky tech market’ hits home sales

Pending sales reflect deals made between buyers and sellers that haven’t yet closed, an early indicator of where the market is heading. Those sales dropped nearly 16% in Seattle from a year earlier, followed by a 14% drop in Houston and a 13% decline in Phoenix.

“Seattle is a tech-driven market, and right now a lot of buyers are feeling cautious about layoffs, AI and job security,” Seattle Redfin agent Chase Costello said in the report.

Seattle-area tech layoffs hit hard this year as Amazon, Microsoft and an array of smaller companies cut jobs as they pour billions of dollars into AI spending. Amazon and Microsoft have together laid off 8,850 Seattle-area workers since May 2025, and Meta cut 1,400 workers in King County this spring. Smaller firms such as Salesforce have also cut local jobs in recent weeks.

While some buyers are still shopping, they’re slower and more careful in their search, Costello said.

More homes are listed for sale and prices have fallen a bit, but the region’s painfully high costs continue to hit would-be buyers hard.

Across King and Snohomish counties, the region Redfin includes in the Seattle area, the median home price dipped nearly 4% from a year earlier. But the median price of $809,000 was roughly double the national average. (Median prices reflect closed sales, which likely took place about a month earlier.)

The median single-family home in Seattle sold for $999,500 last month, down just 1% from a year earlier, according to separate data from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Prices were roughly flat on the Eastside, where many tech workers live and where the median house sold for nearly $1.6 million.

Those high prices coupled with stagnant mortgage rates — averaging 6.7% last week — can quickly push a monthly mortgage payment out of reach.

The median mortgage payment, plus tax and insurance, in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area exceeded $5,000 in April, according to one affordability monitor.

Closed sales, which likely took place about a month earlier, actually dropped more in several Texas cities and in Detroit than in Seattle. Housing markets across Texas have seen an influx of housing construction, reducing “urgency and competition” among buyers, Redfin noted.

Elsewhere, not every housing market is feeling a slump. Closed sales climbed 17% in West Palm Beach, Fla., and 8.5% in San Francisco, a sign of “affluent buyers who aren’t sensitive to cost,” according to Redfin.

An explosion of AI development is also fueling the Bay Area market. At the same time, pending sales dipped 3% in San Francisco in July, a sign that the market could continue to shift.

Seattle and San Francisco ranked near the bottom of the list for the number of days a home spends on market, indicating that homes continue to sell, though Seattle homes spent more time on the market than a year ago while