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.