Tri-Cities Real Estate Market Update: August 2020

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.)