The May residential market for Benton and Washington Counties was relatively calm in the sense that most metrics saw single-digit percentage changes. The biggest take away from May is what new listings and active listings did.

For the fourth consecutive month active listings had greater than 20% increases in 12-month changes. In fact, every month except one since last June saw a 12-month increase 20% or higher (only month under 20% was still pretty high with Jan 2026 at 19.8%). This is a sign that the last half of 2025 and first half of 2026 have had significantly more sellers in the market than the prior 12 months.

New listings saw the first decrease in 1-month change between any April to May in the last 5 years (last time 2021, -4.0%). This is interesting because in May we are often still in the “Spring upswing” of sellers entering the market. June is usually the month we start to see the number of new sellers tapering off through the winter. Does that mean the majority of sellers have entered the market early this year? That will be revealed in June, as we’ll observe if June sees an uptick or decreases further.

Regardless of the interesting listing numbers, buyers closing in the market seem to be keeping a similar pace as the seller fluctuations. That is, Months of Inventory (MOI) has hovered in the 5 or 6-months range for 9 of the last 10 months (January 2026 with 7 MOI). That is a good sign of stability in the market. If sellers were outpacing buyers MOI would rise; and vise versa if buyers were outpacing sellers.

One other statistic that shows the Spring market has settled down quicker than usual is median sales price for residential real estate in Benton & Washington Counties decreased by $8K from last month. Historically in NWA, median sales prices increase gradually from February to June and then slowly decrease July to January. In fact, this was only the second May in the last 10 years that saw the median sales price decrease from April to May (2016 -3.6%).

What does all this mean? Broadly speaking sellers have lost a little leverage in the market; not significantly at this point, but enough to start showing up in the data. Perhaps the economic uncertainty right now is making people wait to make any big decisions, or maybe May was just a weird month and June will pick right back up. We shall see. Overall though, NWA real estate is still a very solid market.

March Market Statistics📈🤓

March brought the beginning of spring and the awakening of the residential real estate market in Benton & Washington counties.

Total sales by count and by dollar amount were both up over 25% from February. There was a higher-than-expected percent increase in expired listings from last month, but the number of new and active listings are within the typical ranges of increases that we see as we enter the spring market.

The median sales price has seemed to settle for a few months; as we have been in the $370K’s range for 6 of the last 7 months. This will likely increase through the summer, but it has been nice to have a market that felt reasonably predictable. One interesting note about median sales price, the 12-month decrease of 0.4% in March was only the second time in the last five years that the 12-month change decreased. A perfect illustration of how the NWA residential market has seen consistent solid growth.

In general, things are looking good, the market is picking up, and buyers and sellers are ready to make closings happen.

NEW STATS for February in NWA!! 📈

As is typical, February saw a slight uptick in activity from January. Last month was the highest total dollars in of residential real estate sold in Benton & Washington counties for any February. The last record high was in February 2022 that was $35M less than February 2026 (almost a 12% increase). February was also the 3rd highest total properties sold by count compared to prior February.

Currently we’re still in a solid seller’s market as indicated by the ratio of sales price to original list price at 98% (seller not having to reduce the price a lot to find a buyer) and the months of inventory at 6, down one from last month (a MOI around 12 is a rough rule of thumb for a transition to a buyer’s market.)

The one thing I think is interesting is new listings, active listings, and expired listings are all up double-digit percentage from the same time last year. Meaning there is more seller activity across the board. Active listings was a record high for February. In fact, this is the only time any February has been over 4,000 active listings; and is the 6th highest active listings for any month in NWA. New listings also hit a new high for any February in NWA; 30% higher than the last record high in new listings in any month of February (Feb 2016). In part these record highs are indications of how much NWA has grown over the years, but it could also be a subtle signal of shifts in the market. We will keep watching these closely no matter what.

Market Updates for December!

Last month was a pretty typical December for Benton and Washington counties. The first thing to point out is the 82.8% jump in expired listings. We almost always see expired listings jump significantly in December, because many sellers sign listing agreements that run through the end of the year, and then they will decide how they want to proceed in the new year. The only other weird data point (besides the median days to sell still not calculating correctly in our system) is the 12-month change in new listings was 0.0%; because it was the rare time when 2 months an entire year a part were the exact same (819 in Dec 2024).

It was nice to see the uptick in sales from November. There were over 140 more closed residential transactions accounting for the additional $50M in total sales dollars compare with November 2025. This may not be much of a surprise though since many buyers like to close on their new homes before the end of the year.

The only distinct note of potential trend changes was that the ratio of sales price to original list price was 97.7%. This is still a high percent; meaning sellers aren’t having to come down much from their original list price to find buyers. The interesting part is December was the first month this statistic has been below 98% since January of 2019.

That covers the important updates for the residential market in NWA for the final month of 2025. If you have questions about anything real estate in NWA, reach out!

We’ve reached November and sales were down….is it surprising or just seasonal? Let’s talk about it.

Signs of seasonal changes:

➡️ From October, total sales by dollar and by count decrease 18.1% and 17.6%, respectively. These decreases are within the range of similar percentage decreases for prior Novembers.

Signs not explained by seasonality:

➡️ Months of inventory rose by 1 in November. Seven months of inventory is the highest it’s been in almost 7 years (January 2019). That means the pace sellers are entering the market increased relative to the pace buyers are closing on properties. We’re still in a seller’s market, but as the months of inventory inches higher, we transition into a buyer’s market. As a rough rule of thumb, a months of inventory close to 12 is often considered to start of a buyer’s market.
➡️ Interesting to see expired listings 12-month and 1-month changes diverge, meaning one positive and one negative. But even more interesting is they diverging with double-digit changes in both. And even more interesting than that is the fact that both the 10.2% increase from Nov 2024 and 11.1% decreased from the month prior are the largest changes for both metrics for any November in the past 10 years.
➡️ This makes the 6th consecutive month that the 12-month change in active listings as increased more than 20%. In fact, 4 of those 6 months have been greater than 30% increases. We haven’t had a 12-month change in active listings greater than 21.7% in the last decade. So, 6-consecutive months higher than that is saying something. Houses are sitting on the market longer. We may have been increasing the number of new listings year to year, but this year has seen larger increases than years past. If the days to sell statistic was working correctly in our MLS, we would have more insights on just how much longer homes were taking to sell.
➡️ While it is not uncommon to see the number of new listings reduce during the winter months, the 30.5% decrease in 1-month change of new listings is the second largest percentage decrease in 1-month change for new listings in more than a decade (April 2019 higher at -36.2%). The mystery is why are significantly fewer owners choosing to sell? Perhaps the bulk of the equity-rich owners have sold their homes that were going to, and new sellers are holding tight to see what the future entails. Who knows.

The thing we take away from all of this is when multiple statistics are the first or largest of something in more than a decade it is hard to say things are the same old, same old. I can’t say it’s the beginning of a large shift, because everyone should know a sample size of one doesn’t make a trend. We’ll have to keep an eye on it to see if a trend does forms. Time shall tell.

Like last month, the error in median days to sell is impacting the data for September so this metric was not included in this month’s analysis. Hopefully it will be corrected for October. Other than that, there was really only two main things that stand out after looking over the latest month of data.

First, enough time as past that it is fair to say we are back to the pattern of gradual rise in median sells price prior to the hyper-competitive market during COVID. Going back, the median sales price in Benton and Washington counties was rising at a consistent pattern from 2015 to March of 2021. (Picture a slightly increasing straight line…the prices for each month might oscillate above or below the line but overall, months stay within a small margin of the line.) During this time frame, we could broadly say for every one month, the median sales price would rise about $1,100. Contrast this with the peak 13-months in COVID (April 2021 to April 2022), when for every one month, the median sales price increased almost $5,600 (a 500% increase)! Since May of 2022, we have been back to the broad consistent market-wide pattern of about a $1,100 increase in median sales price per month. This is all to say the NWA market is back on pace with the growth that was happening prior to the surge of COVID-market-conditions.

Second, there may be subtle sign of a market slowing. Each of the last 4 months have set a new 10-year high for the number of Active Listings. This means there are more sellers looking to sell that have not found a buyer. This is also reflected in the increase in months of inventory (MOI). Last month was the first time we’ve had a month of Inventory of 6 outside of January or February (when the market is typically at its slowest) since 2018. Another subtle sign is that expired listings increase 15.1% from last month; showing sellers are leaving the market without having found a buyer. Even with these three points, it’s worth pointing out that we have not seen a notable reduction in the ratio of sales price to original list price, which often drops when buyers have more leverage in the market. That said, continuing to monitor the statistics every month is the best way to know how the market is changing.