December 2024 Housing Market Update: Holiday Hibernation Begins

When you combine an election and the start of the holidays, you can’t be surprised to see a slow month in Tri-Cities real estate. If not for the price of homes in Richland going up last month, you’d be looking at an entirely red month of market stats! It’s normal at this time of year for inventory and sales to slow down, but I don’t think we’ve ever had all red or all green.

Let’s dive in to this month’s update.

Inventory of Homes for Sale

The number of homes for sale fell in every city we track except Benton City, which was unchanged from November with 30 homes for sale. West Richland saw a double-digit decline, but the big three cities were all single digits lower than a month ago.

Overall, inventory dropped 6% to 879 homes for sale. But that’s about 7% more homes for sale than the 825 available one year ago.

When we get to this time of year, fewer sellers typically enter the market. There were only 280 new listings to hit the market in November, a 25% drop from October.

Sales Activity

As per usual, sales activity also dropped last month. We had 254 closings in November, an 18% drop from the previous month. It’s the first time since April that we’ve had fewer than 300 closings in a single month. Homes that close in November would normally go under contract in October, and October was a pretty slooow month thanks to the impending election.

Those 254 closings are about 3% more than we had one year ago.

Our median days on market dropped a bit from 24 in October to 28 last month.

Tri-Cities Home Prices

Despite the slowdown in sales, home prices were pretty much unchanged — just a $100 drop from October to November. Median prices have hardly changed at all over the past four months:

• August, 2024: $430,000
• September, 2024: $427,500
• October, 2024: $430,000
• November, 2024: $429,900

A year ago, our median sales price was $416K, so we’re up about 3.3% since then.

To sum up: Between the election and the holidays, it’s no surprise that the Tri-Cities market has slowed down. Anecdotally, my phone started ringing off the hook the Friday after the election, but I won’t be surprised at all to see sales and inventory continue to decline for another few months. That’s just what happens over the winter holidays.

And that’s a look at this month’s Tri-Cities housing market! As always, please get in touch if you ever 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!

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