Tri-Cities Real Estate Market Update: August 2020

By in Tri-Cities Housing Market with 0 Comments

Look at all the green on that graphic. July 2020 was the busiest month in Tri-Cities real estate history, and we set two new housing market records. Let’s dive in…

New Record for Homes Sold

Look in that column on the far left, second section down: 520 homes sold. That’s the most homes sold we’ve ever had in a single month. (I went back through the TC Assn. of Realtors’ stats, which date back to 1992, to confirm.) It’s also the first time we’ve ever broken the 500-homes-sold mark. The previous high was back in July 2015, when TCAR says we had 466 homes sold. One year ago, we had 431 homes sold in July 2019.

As you can see above, Kennewick, Richland, and West Richland all saw big jumps in the number of homes sold last month. Pasco was down, but only 4%. Benton City and Burbank also rose, but their quantity is so small that it doesn’t have a huge impact on the area as a whole.

Strong Seller’s Market Continues

Unfortunately, inventory isn’t keeping up with demand and we’re still strongly in a seller’s market. You can see that we had 529 active listings on August 5th, which is 6% better than the month before — but it’s also more than 100 homes fewer than were on the market last August. We need to get more sellers in the market and get new homes built so we can start to balance this out a bit.

Another sign of how strong the seller’s market is seen down in the bottom horizontal line: days on market. Across the area, homes spent a median of five days on market, which is the lowest since we started doing monthly market stats a couple years ago. Every single city/town we track had a DOM of less than 10 last month.

New Record for Median Sales Price

When you add low inventory and fast sales together, you end up with rising home prices — and that $334,950 number in the left column is the highest we’ve ever seen in the Tri-Cities area. For comparison, a year ago the median sales price across the area was $297,499.

And for the second consecutive month, all three of the “Tri” cities and West Richland had median prices of $300,000 or above.

As always, get in touch if you ever have questions about the housing market here in the Tri-Cities, or even in your specific neighborhood/town/city.

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

Get in touch with Cari's team!

Have a question about the Tri-Cities? About the process of buying or selling a house? Get in touch with us below -- name and email are required so we can respond. Please provide your phone number if you'd prefer a call or text message in return.

  • We share Tri-Cities news, real estate tips and local market stats and much more. It's free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.
  • You'll get new listings sent to your inbox up to a day before the general public sees them. It's free and there's no obligation.

Share This
About The Author
Cari McGee

My husband and I came to the Tri-Cities in 1994, and we thought it would be a temporary stop on our way to larger cities. He was a television sports anchor at the time, and we planned to go wherever the "next step up" took us. Twenty-plus years later, we're still here and we've loved every minute of it! We have two children now, and we've found the Tri-Cities area is a wonderful place to raise a family. It's a great place to do outdoorsy things -- I like to hike Badger Mountain or run along the river path. I also love reading ... by a cozy fire in the winter or a beautiful picture window in the summer (with the A/C on!). I've been a licensed Realtor since 2004. I earned my managing broker's license in 2016, which means I can run my own brokerage, or create a team of real estate agents and supervise them, which is exactly what I did when I formed the Cari McGee Real Estate Team in 2018! We have administrative and marketing personnel, as well as additional agents to serve you. I became a director of the Tri-Cities Association of Realtors Board of Directors in 2016, became Secretary/Treasurer of the organization, and was elected to Vice President in 2019. Want to talk about real estate? Click here to schedule a meeting with me!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *