February 2025 Housing Market Update: Sales Activity Slows, But Home Prices Rise

You might be concerned or maybe alarmed by the amount of red on this month’s market update graphic, but that combination of red and green is common for this time of year. Sales activity was way down last month, but that’s the tail end of the holiday season doing its thing. (Closings in January are primarily homes that would’ve gone under contract in December.)

So with all that in mind, let’s dive in to this month’s numbers.

Sales Activity

We only had 196 homes close in January — a 25% decline from the previous month. That’s the slowest sales month we’ve had in exactly one year! In January 2024, only 190 homes sold. So this year, we’re running about 3% ahead of last year.

Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland all had their fewest closings in the past year. West Richland was the only city of the six we track where sales were up last month.

If history holds true, sales activity will start to rise this month before really picking up in the spring.

Tri-Cities Home Prices

The median sales price last month rose a little more than $8,500 to $428,512. That’s 3.3% higher than a year ago when our median price was $415,000 — a small but healthy appreciation in prices.

Kennewick was the one outlier among the three cities (plus West Richland). In Kennewick, prices dropped about $25,000 (or about 6%) from the previous month and are now at their lowest in 11 months.

Inventory of Homes for Sale

Maybe the most surprising thing about this month’s update is how many homes remain on the market. As of our check on February 6, there were 786 homes for sale across the Tri-Cities. That’s down only 2% from early January.

Part of that is because fewer homes were sold during January, as I mentioned above. But it’s also because we saw a lot of new sellers come into the market last month. There were 367 new listings in January. That’s 53% more new listings than we had in December, and 24% more than we had in January 2024.

To sum up: That influx of new listings last month bodes well for buyers and their choices for finding new homes. Meanwhile, home sellers can be happy about home prices staying strong. Sales activity slowed last month, but that’s to be expected at this time of year and should start to change this month or next.

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!

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