King County for-sale inventory keeps setting records, even as prices hold
For four years the defining fact of the King County housing market was scarcity: inventory fell to a low of 746 active listings in January 2022, and bidding wars followed. That era is over. At the end of June 2026 there were 6,913 homes for sale — the highest count in the decade Realtor.com has tracked the county, the fourth straight month to set a series record, and 19% more than a year earlier.
Inventory is seasonal — it builds through spring and summer, thins in winter — so the cleaner signal is the year-over-year climb, which has now run for several spring seasons. Supply is rebuilding faster than demand: the Northwest MLS put the county at roughly 3.4 months of inventory in May, still under the four- to-six months most consider balanced, but the loosest in years. The permit pipeline turning back up suggests more supply behind it.
Prices have not followed inventory down by much. The median list price was $850,000 in June 2026 — off 4% from a year earlier and about 10% below the $949,248 peak of May 2022, but still roughly 50% above where the series began in 2016.
The market’s pace has settled rather than seized: the median listing sits 37 days before going under contract, about the same as a year ago and a week slower than two springs back. More homes, on the market a little longer, with prices drifting down — a buyer’s market by the standards of the last decade, even if it would not have looked like one in 1995.
Two caveats on the source. First, these are list prices from active listings, not closed-sale prices: for the actual transacted figure, the Northwest MLS reported a King County median sale price of $875,000 in May 2026 — close to the list-price line, and the number to cite when a local sale price is needed. We chart the Realtor.com/FRED listing series because it is clean, current, and free to republish with attribution; NWMLS’s own statistics carry terms that restrict derivative charts. Second, this chart is nominal — unlike the blog’s usual inflation-adjusted dollar charts — because list prices are the number buyers and sellers actually negotiate; in real terms the pullback from the 2022 peak is larger.
Source: Realtor.com Residential Listings for King County, WA (FIPS 53033), via FRED — active listings, median list price, median days on market. Closed-sale figures: Northwest MLS Monthly Market Snapshot (May 2026). State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Index for Washington. Monthly; FRED posts each month’s figures early the following month, and this chart refreshes on the next daily build.