Dec. ’22 Housing Market Update: Median Home Price Drops Below $400K

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The Tri-Cities housing market continues to shift closer to what we consider a balanced market. When we did our snapshot last week, there were 708 homes for sale (AKA “inventory”). Combine that with the 220 homes that sold last month, and that gives us 3.2 months of inventory right now. We generally consider a market to be balanced when there are 4-6 months of inventory.

There are more signs of the continuing shift right up on the graphic above: prices are down, days on market are on the rise, and inventory only dropped slightly. Let’s take a deeper dive into this month’s market update!

Tri-Cities Home Prices

Home prices dropped for the second straight month, and fell below $400,000 for the first time since our December 2021 snapshot. Prices have fallen by $40,000 over the past two months, essentially wiping out all of 2022’s price increases and putting us back where we were in January, when the median price was exactly $400,000.

Prices fell in all three of the Tri-Cities, with Kennewick seeing the biggest decline at more than $33,000. Kennewick’s median price hasn’t been this low since May 2021. In Pasco and Richland, the current median prices are close to where they were a year ago. Prices jumped last month in West Richland, but that kind of volatility is pretty common there because so few homes sell each month compared to the bigger cities.

Tri-Cities Homes for Sale

The number of homes for sale stayed above 700 when we did our snapshot last week, but was down 7% from last month. It’s been years since we’ve had two straight months with more than 700 homes for sale — October and November of 2019, if you’re curious.

Of those 708 homes for sale, almost half have had a price reduction: 338 to be exact, which comes out to 48%. Price drops are getting more common; when we checked a couple months ago, 38% of available homes had a price reduction. This is happening most often in Richland, where 52% of current listings have had their asking price reduced.

Notice, too, that this inventory is taking longer to sell. The median days on market across the area rose to 19 days last month, which we haven’t seen since February 2020 (23 median DOM). A year ago, our median days on market was just five.

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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