Nov. ’22 Housing Market Update: Home Inventory Jumps to 7-Year High

It’s nice when our monthly market graphic has some symmetry to it, and this month’s sure does! The top line, showing active listings, is almost all green — showing consistent increases in homes for sale. And the second line, showing homes sold last month, is almost all red. (Burbank is just messing with us this month and not playing along!)

I mentioned in the October market update that we had two months of inventory; this month we’re up to 2.7 months of inventory. What does that mean? If no new homes became available for sale, our current inventory (759 homes) would run out after 2.7 months based on how fast homes are selling. We started tracking monthly data exactly four years ago in November 2018, and since then we’ve never had as much as 2.7 months of inventory.

Let’s take a closer look at this month’s numbers.

Homes for Sale in the Tri-Cities

As of November 9, there were 759 available homes across the Tri-Cities. This is double the inventory we had just five months ago (374 in June) and the highest inventory has been since we started tracking in November 2018. The Tri-Cities Assn. of Realtors tracks the same numbers a little differently than we do (their numbers include towns and cities further away from the Tri-Cities), but according to their data, we haven’t had 759 available homes for sale since late in 2015!

Of those 759 homes on the market right now, 454 (or about 60%) are existing homes that can be bought and moved into right away — the other 40% are new construction homes.

There are also more homes for sale at the lower end of the market: 189 of the homes for sale are priced below $400K, which amounts to about 25% of all homes on the market. Over the past few months, that number has held steady down around 21%.

Each of the four main cities in the area has more homes for sale now than they’ve had in years. Take a look:

• Kennewick: highest inventory since January 2020
• Pasco: highest since January 2019
• Richland: highest since pre-November 2018
• West Richland: highest since November 2019

Tri-Cities Home Prices

Prices, meanwhile, continue to hold pretty flat. The median price for all homes sold last month across the area was $425,000, down $15,000 from the previous month. Our median price back in February was $420,000 — so despite some ups and down since then, prices are staying steady.

Both Richland and West Richland saw significant price declines last month. But Richland’s home prices have also stayed pretty flat all year; the median was $455K in January, so $470K last month isn’t a huge jump.

In West Richland, though, the median sales price hasn’t been in the $430K neighborhood since June 2021, when it was $427K.

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.)