SPOKANE, Wash. — The hot housing market in Spokane County is setting records.
“This is the highest we’ve seen the median sales price for any month," said Rob Higgins, Executive Vice President of the Spokane Association of Realtors (SAR).
The average closing price for homes in Spokane County was $346,098 in October 2020 compared to $287,985 in October 2019, according to SAR’s Monthly Home Sales Report. That's an increase of just over 20 percent.
According to the report, the median closing price for a home in Spokane County was $320,000 last month compared to $265,000 during the same time in 2019. That amounts to an increase of 20.8 percent.
Inventory is also low in Spokane County, with 424 available properties as of the report's publishing in October. That represents less than a one-month supply. A balanced housing market is somewhere in the range of a four-to-six-month supply, Higgins said.
Higgins added that SAR believes inventory right now is the lowest it's been since they began tracking the number.
“It’s being driven by a very strong demand and a limited supply of houses coming on the market, and that’s driven by a number of factors," Higgins said.
One of those factors is people living in their homes longer than they did in the past, according to Higgins. There isn't enough new construction happening either.
“We just haven’t been building enough houses in our inventory for our population growth," Higgins added.
Low interest rates for home loans are also driving the market right now, Higgins said.
It's a seller's market in Spokane County, which means there are more buyers than available homes. Higgins doesn't expect that to change any time soon, but he is hoping things will improve with more inventory available in the spring of 2021.
Data from Zillow, an online real estate database company, says home values in Spokane have also increased by nearly 14% over the past year. The company also predicts they will rise by 8.9% in the next year.
