While headlines across the country talk of scarce inventory, the Tri-Cities is again going against the grain. Locally, the number of homes for sale has gone up three straight months — even while the number of homes sold is also on the rise. Home prices remain steady, too.
Let’s take a dive into this month’s numbers!
Homes for Sale in the Tri-Cities
When we did our snapshot on the 5th of this month, inventory (AKA the number of homes for sale) was at 673 — that’s the highest it’s been in all of 2023. It’s only 3% higher than a month ago, but it’s 31% more homes for sale than we had one year ago. Want to compare it to pre-pandemic times? It’s about 20% higher than our inventory in July 2019.
Of this month’s 673 available homes, 59% are existing homes that you can buy and move into right away. The other 41% are new construction. As recently as this past February, we had a 50/50 split between existing homes and new construction.
About 28% of that inventory is homes priced below $400K. That’s pretty good — we were closer to 20% in that price range at this time last year. But we can still use more lower-priced homes on the market.
Kennewick had 236 homes for sale as of our snapshot on July 5, and has seen four straight months of rising inventory. There were 71 homes for sale in West Richland this month — the highest we’ve seen there in the five years that we’ve tracked local market data this closely.
Homes Sold Last Month
Those inventory gains are happening even as we sell more homes each month! Last month, 320 homes closed across the Tri-Cities. That’s up 16% from the previous month, so we saw more activity despite interest rates remaining right around 7% in June. A year ago this month, we sold 383 homes — mortgage rates were in the upper 5% range then.
Those 320 homes sold with a median of 11 days on market. A year ago, the median was six (6) days on market. One more note: The median list price of those 320 homes sold was $435,000, and the median sales price was $432,495. In other words, homes sold last month at 99.4% of their list price.
Kennewick saw a huge spike with 130 homes sold last month — a 55% gain month-over-month.
Tri-Cities Home Prices
As I just mentioned above, homes sold last month at a median price of $432,495. That makes five straight months with median prices between $415K and $435K. It also means we’re still in that $400K to $450K window that we’ve been in since January 2022.
Our current median price is down 3.5% from one year ago and up 12% from two years ago.
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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