Feb. ’21 Housing Market Update: Inventory Drops as Prices Hit All-Time High

The squeeze continues for Tri-Cities home buyers. Inventory is down again, while home prices hit an all-time high in January.

The median price of a Tri-Cities home hit $341,990 last month, a gain of a little more than $5K from December. That breaks the record of $340,000 set back in September. A year ago, the median was $299,900.

Meanwhile, inventory keeps falling. The 324 homes on the market when we did our snapshot Friday is the lowest since we started tracking in 2018. A year ago, we had 556 homes available — so we’re down 42% year-over-year. Inventory has dropped for three straight months now. Only Kennewick saw an increase in homes on the market.

The number of homes sold last month was also down, but that’s not unusual. This year it’s definitely driven to some degree by our low inventory. But also, the only homeowners who typically sell over the holidays are people who absolutely need to sell, so that leads to a drop in homes sold early in the year.

Here are a couple of other numbers worth looking at:

• Pasco hit an all-time high with a median price of $350,000. Pasco home prices have only gone down in 3 of the past 12 months.
• Richland also reached a new high with its $377,500 median price. The previous high of $374,347 happened in October.
• Kennewick’s median home price has gone down 3 of the past 4 months.
• The 97 homes sold last month in Kennewick is the lowest since the spring of 2019.

Please drop us a note if you ever have questions about the housing market here in the Tri-Cities, or even in your specific neighborhood/town/city.

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