April ’23 Housing Market Update: Sales Activity Hits 6-Month High

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Things you can count on every Spring in the Tri-Cities: warmer temperatures, windy days, the start of minor league baseball, and a big jump in real estate activity!

We had 274 homes sell in March, a 43% jump from February. It’s also the most homes we’ve sold in any month since last October. As you can see on the graphic above, every city we track saw a double-digit gain in homes sold with the exception of Benton City. It’s like clockwork. Take a look at how sales activity has picked up each of the past four years:

  • March 2022: up 36%
  • March 2021: up 23%
  • March 2020: up 25%
  • March 2019: up 13%

Tri-Cities Homes for Sale (aka Inventory)

The number of homes for sale has dropped five months in a row. During our market snapshot on April 5, there were 567 homes on the market. That’s only down 5% from last month, but it’s a 25% drop from November.

Some of that is just seasonal regularity — some sellers don’t like to list their homes during the winter/holiday months. We’ll see if they come to the market now that warmer weather is here and the market is getting busy again. But we also know that a lot of homeowners are reluctant to sell because, if they need to buy a new home, it would mean trading in their current 3-5% mortgage rate for today’s 5-7% rates.

Either way, we can definitely use the inventory!

Tri-Cities Home Prices

Our median price for March’s home sales was down $20,000, which may seem concerning…until you remember that prices were up by $20,400 the month before! So we’re right back where we were in February.

Overall, our home prices have been pretty static since January 2022 — never straying from the $400K to $450K range.

One last note: The spike in activity last month did have a noticeable impact on days on market. We went from 34 days on market two months ago to just 22 last month.

And that’s a look at this month’s Tri-Cities housing market! As always, please drop us a note if you ever have questions about what’s happening around town or in your specific neighborhood.

(*Remember that days on market can sometimes be skewed by how new construction homes are processed in the MLS.)

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About The Author
Cari McGee

My husband and I came to the Tri-Cities in 1994, and we thought it would be a temporary stop on our way to larger cities. He was a television sports anchor at the time, and we planned to go wherever the "next step up" took us. Twenty-plus years later, we're still here and we've loved every minute of it! We have two children now, and we've found the Tri-Cities area is a wonderful place to raise a family. It's a great place to do outdoorsy things -- I like to hike Badger Mountain or run along the river path. I also love reading ... by a cozy fire in the winter or a beautiful picture window in the summer (with the A/C on!). I've been a licensed Realtor since 2004. I earned my managing broker's license in 2016, which means I can run my own brokerage, or create a team of real estate agents and supervise them, which is exactly what I did when I formed the Cari McGee Real Estate Team in 2018! We have administrative and marketing personnel, as well as additional agents to serve you. I became a director of the Tri-Cities Association of Realtors Board of Directors in 2016, became Secretary/Treasurer of the organization, and was elected to Vice President in 2019. Want to talk about real estate? Click here to schedule a meeting with me!

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