SPOKANE, Wash. — The Spokane metropolitan area was named the top market for out-of-town home buyers in 2019 in a recently published report from Realtor.com.
According to the report by economic research analyst Sabrina Speianu, homes for sale in the Spokane-Spokane Valley metro area received 58.1% of their views from shoppers outside of the metro area and 31.9% from out-of-state shoppers.
Realtor.com crafted the report by analyzing its listing spanning from the 100 largest metro areas in the first quarter of 2019 compared to the same time in 2018. The analysis primarily focuses on a metro area’s inbound to outbound ratio, which is the ratio of views from that metro to other metros, compared to views from that metro flowing to other metros.
The largest portion of shoppers outside of the metro area are coming from the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area, with those residents contributing 35.3% of views from outside of Spokane, the report says. Seattle is followed by the Atlanta, Georgia, metro area and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which contributed to approximately 6.2% and 4.1% of views outside of the metro area.
On the flip side, Spokane residents shopping for homes outside of the metro area looked to Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint and the Kennewick-Richland metro are the most.
Nearly 261,000 people moved to Washington state in 2018, according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The biggest gains came from California, Oregon, Texas, Arizona and Idaho.
Shoppers outside of the top 10 metro areas listed in the report generally viewed properties less expensive than the median listing price of their own metro areas, according to the report.
The report also found that in area with the most inflow of demand, out-of-metro shoppers viewed homes that were 4.2 times more expensive than those that locals viewed. Speianu said this means increased competition from out-of-town shoppers and upward pressure on the prices of homes in these areas, including the Spokane metro area.
In February 2019, KREM reported that Zillow data showed that Spokane homes were selling faster than Seattle homes for the first time in six years.
While Spokane area home prices climbed almost 12 percent from 2017-2018, with a median home sale price of $200,000 in December 2018, they are still far cheaper than homes in Seattle – which sold for $695,000, according to Zillow.
The Spokane/Spokane Valley area was also ranked No. 16 on Realtor.com's list of the top 20 housing markets in September compared to a No. 21 ranking in September 2018.
The Kennewick-Richland area also made the list of top 20 housing markets at No. 9.