August 2025 Real Estate Market Update: Prices hold steady as inventory rises

What an interesting chart above! Typically, when more homes are available and fewer homes are selling, you’d assume that prices would drop. But as you can see above, our median price was unchanged between June and July. Let’s take a deeper look at this month’s market numbers and see what’s going on.

Inventory continues to rise

The number of homes for sale across the Tri-Cities — what we call “inventory” — was just under 1200 when we took our market snapshot on August 5. That makes five straight months of rising inventory, which is normal for the spring and summer months. Inventory is up about 37% compared to one year ago.

This is also the most homes available in our area in 11 years: According to Tri-City Association of Realtors®’ data, there were 1280 homes for sale in August 2014.

Part of the increase in inventory is due to a slowdown in sales, which I’ll get to next. But new listings remain strong and continue to contribute to our overall inventory. There were 525 new listings that hit the market in July, which is about 2% more than came to market in June.

One interesting note about homes that are currently on the market: 506 of the 1193 homes for sale have had a price drop. That’s 42.4% of all inventory. We don’t chart that stat every month, but “normal” in our area seems to be between 30-35%.

Sales activity fell last month

Sales activity has been on an up-and-down ride in 2025, and that continued last month when we had 329 homes sell — down 7% from June’s sales activity. The decline would’ve been larger if not for a 19% rise in sales last month in Kennewick. The three other largest cities we watch — Pasco, Richland, and West Richland — each had double-digit declines in home sales last month.

You might be wondering if it’s unusual for sales to drop in the middle of summer — and is that a bad sign for the market?

The answer is no, it’s not unusual. Sales have dropped between June and July every year since 2019, with the exception of 2020 and 2024. If history holds true, we’ll see a small rise in home sales this month — likely driven by people wanting to get in their new home before the school year begins.

Last month’s sales decline was accompanied by homes staying on the market longer. Our median days on market in July was 20, compared to 17 days on market in June. (The average DOM last month was 50.)

Home prices held steady

Despite the rise in inventory and the decline in sales, home prices were unchanged last month. As you can see on the graphic above, prices were up in Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, and down everywhere else.

Home prices last month were about 1.5% lower than they were a year ago. We’re still in this long period of flat home prices. The area’s median price has been sitting between $399,000 and $450,000 since January 2022.

To sum up: The number of homes for sale continues to rise to levels we haven’t seen in more than a decade. That’s great news for buyers, who have more to choose from and less competition when it’s time to write an offer. But even though sales activity dropped a bit last month, buyers aren’t benefiting from lower prices. Sellers, meanwhile, have to be patient. Fewer homes are selling, and the ones that do are taking longer. Putting your best foot forward with a clean, upgraded home and a reasonable price is a must in our current market, especially if you have a deadline to sell and get out of your house.

As always, please get in touch if you have questions about what’s happening around town or in your specific neighborhood. Use the TEXT US tool below to send a text, call us at (509) 392-4705, or contact us via email — whatever’s best for you!

(Quick note: We originally did our market snapshot on August 5, and the “Active Listings” row — i.e., inventory of homes for sale — reflects that date. But when we were putting this report together on August 11, we noticed that there was a noticeable difference in the number of homes sold compared to what we saw on August 5. This can happen if agents are delayed in entering their sales data in the MLS, and isn’t unusual in the summer months due to travel and other commitments. So the “Sold” and “Median sales price” rows reflect the data from August 11.)

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