September 2025 Real Estate Market Update: Late Summer Surge Continues

The summer of 2025 has decided to go out…maybe not with a “bang,” but definitely with a surge in activity across the board. You can see all the green on the graphic above — inventory is up, sales are up, and home prices are up, too.

Let’s dive in and talk about what it all means in this month’s market update.

Tri-Cities Home Prices

I’ll start with prices this month, because that’s where we saw the most movement. Our median price for August home sales was $440,000 — a gain of just over $10,000 from July. It’s also the second-highest monthly median price we’ve had in 2025, behind $445K back in April. The same is happening in Richland, where this month’s $499,500 median is the second-highest this year, also behind April.

One year ago, we had a median sales price of $430K, so prices are up a healthy 2.3% year-over-year.

Sales Activity

We had what might be one last surge in sales activity before the new school year. Home sales were up 2.4% last month across the area. Pasco led the way with a 31% rise in sales, which more than offset the 20% drop we saw in Kennewick.

Sales activity is pretty much even with where we were a year ago. As you can see above, we sold 337 homes last month. In August 2024, we sold 341 homes.

We just had a poor jobs report last week, and interest rates have already started to drop — so we’ll see if that brings more buyers into the market. Maybe this won’t be the last surge of the year in home sales.

Before we move on, one notable change is the speed of last month’s sales. They spent a median of 27 days on the market — a noticeable drop from 20 DOM in July. A year ago, we had a median DOM of 15! So even though the number of sales is similar to last year, homes are taking almost twice as long to sell this year. (Please read that again if you’re selling a home now, or will be soon.)

Homes Available for Sale

Our inventory of homes for sale continued to inch up this month. When we did our market snapshot on Sept. 5, there were 1,208 active homes for sale. That’s just 1% more than a month ago, but it’s a whopping 32% more than a year ago.

What’s interesting is that the growth in inventory is not due to new listings coming to market. New inventory was down by about 15% in August. So instead of new homes coming to market, what’s driving the rise in inventory right now is what I said above about days on market. Homes are sitting on the market longer, which increases inventory.

One interesting note about home inventory: West Richland had 99 homes for sale when we did our check on the 5th. Since we started tracking our own market data in 2018, West Richland has never reached 100 or more homes for sale. I’m very curious to see if that will finally happen next month!

To sum up: Just about all the numbers we watch are up this month — none more so than home prices, which rose a little more than $10,000 compared to a month ago. Inventory and sales activity are also up slightly in what might be one final summer surge. But I’ll be watching what happens this month now that we’re seeing signs of lowered interest rates that could bring more buyers into the market.

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. )