Sept. ’23 Housing Market Update: Good News for Buyers AND Sellers!

Look at all the green in this month’s market update graphic! It’s not usual for one color to dominate like that. It means there’s something for everyone to smile about this month. Let’s dive in to the numbers.

Homes for Sale in the Tri-Cities (aka Inventory)

I was thinking we were gonna hit 800 active homes for sale, but we were ONE HOME SHORT when we took our snapshot on Tuesday afternoon. It’s possible we hit the 800 mark earlier in the day or even later in the day. But it was 799 active listings when we checked.

That’s the most homes available since we started tracking almost five years ago.

Buyers, you have more homes to choose from than you’ve had in quite a while. And that’s true no matter where in the area you want to buy. Inventory is up in all six cities/towns that we watch. Consider this:

• Kennewick has its most active listings since November 2019
• Pasco has its most active listings since we started tracking in November 2018
• Richland has its most active listings since November 2022

Even Burbank, which doesn’t see much activity month-to-month, has its highest inventory since June 2019.

Tri-Cities Homes Sold

Activity is also up across the Tri-Cities! Our 334 homes sold last month is the most we’ve had in one month since last October. Pasco had 80 closings last month, its most in exactly a year. Richland had its highest number of closings since last October. This is good news for sellers — it means we have active buyers who are in the market despite mortgage rates hovering in the 7% range.

Last month’s closings sold in a median of 14 days on market — unchanged from the month before.

Tri-Cities Home Prices

For the entire area, we saw a $5,000 rise in median home prices last month — powered almost entirely by higher prices in Kennewick. You can see on the graphic above that prices dropped in Pasco, Richland, and West Richland…but Kennewick’s $32K jump was enough to pull the whole area to a modest rise.

Still, home prices remain steady overall. We’re in a stretch of eight straight months with median prices sitting between $415K and $435K. And going back further, our median prices have stayed in the $400K to $450K window since January 2022.

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.)