New home listings in Clark County rise 18% over year ago

More Clark County homes are on the market this year than last, a welcome sign for buyers going into the busy spring real estate season.

New listings in January jumped 18.5 percent compared with January 2025, according to the latest Regional Multiple Listing Service report.

“We are now looking at a little more than four months of inventory on the market,” said Anthony Stroud, president of the Clark County Association of Realtors. (Inventory refers to the number of months it would take to sell every home currently listed for sale in a market area.)

Inventory in January 2025 sat just over three months, while inventory in December 2025 was 2.8.

“That’s a pretty significant jump,” Stroud said. The local housing market has slowed slightly, he added.

Homes are sitting on the market longer — now 91 days compared with 77 in January 2025. Closed sales have dipped 12 percent compared with January 2025.

“For both sides of a deal, heading into the transaction with a clear head and realistic expectations is going to be paramount,” Stroud said.

The median price for homes climbed 3.8 percent compared with January 2025, rising from $529,000 to $549,000. That’s been driven by demand and a lower inventory, Stroud said.

“We’re starting to see this back down a little bit,” he said.

Nearly 75 percent of Washington homeowners have a mortgage interest rate below 5 percent, according to a presentation from Washington-based real estate economist Matthew Gardner.

The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.01 percent in the week of Feb. 19, according to government-sponsored lender Freddie Mac. That’s lower than it’s been for much of the year, but still significantly higher than the average 2.81 percent rate buyers saw in February 2021.

Stroud said it’s a compounding effect where homeowners are reluctant to move because their current interest rates are about half of what they could get today.

“They don’t have the initiative to move, as they have in the past,” Stroud said.

So while more homes are coming onto the market, higher interest rates are keeping would-be shoppers at bay.

Stroud expects the local housing market to remain fairly flat heading into 2026.

“The only thing that could possibly change that is if we have a shift in interest rates,” he said.