The Coming Lot Scarcity

1Executive summary

Whoever has the better read on lot values controls the negotiation. That read starts with a number nobody publishes: how many buildable single-family lots the region actually produces, and how many are actually coming. This briefing consolidates the title-plant transaction record, a three-county audit of land-use notices, and recorded finished-lot sales into one answer — and the answer is that production has fallen structurally below both its own history and the region's adopted growth targets.

Every figure in this report is dated, sourced, and reproducible from the underlying transaction table. Estimates are labeled as estimates. Headline figures above are pinned to the published July 2, 2026 edition. Charts and tables in this briefing query the live data layer on the published de-duplicated basis and may differ marginally from pinned figures as audited corrections land — members see current values in the portal. The notice-stage pipeline charted in Section 3 is a different measure from the audited forward-entitlement figure above: it spans all notice stages and is early-stage heavy, so its deliverable share is materially lower.

2The production baseline

The transaction record — every preliminary-plat acquisition crossing a title desk since 2019, extended to 2011 for Snohomish — shows three counties on three different paths to the same place. King fell first and furthest, shrinking every year since 2020. Pierce compressed sharply from its own 2020 peak, and roughly half of what remains sits inside a single master-planned community. Snohomish is cyclical rather than collapsing, but its most recent trough ranks among the county's thinnest years on record.

2026 is a partial year through the latest ingested month and is never annualized or charted as a full year.

3The forward pipeline

Production history says what happened. The land-use notice record says what's coming. Rebuilding every notice across the three counties — de-duplicated to one record per project, litigation and withdrawn filings excluded — yields a live pipeline distributed across four notice stages. The distribution is the story: a large share sits at pre-application, the stage with the highest fallout rate and the longest path to a recorded lot.

Set the pipeline against history and the imbalance is explicit: the live notice pipeline replaces multi-year county production averages at well under parity in every county audited here. A pipeline total is a floor, not a census — filings that never resolve to a parseable lot count are excluded rather than guessed at.

4What lots cost

Two price series matter, and they are not the same series. Acquisition pricing — what developers pay per proposed lot at the preliminary-plat stage — and finished-lot pricing — what builders pay per recorded, shovel-ready lot. King acquisition pricing has risen even as volume collapsed; Pierce finished lots have climbed steadily since 2019. Intercompany transfers between commonly owned entities are excluded from every $/lot average published here (see the March 2026 data note on the JK Monarch → Trumark cluster).

5Named communities ≥ 100 lots

Every community of 100 lots or more identified in the transaction and notice record, with the verification basis stated per line — the same confidence discipline members see on every record in the data layer.

6What this data can and cannot say