Last month we predicted the spring lull. The market read our forecast and did the opposite.
A month ago we told you this market was tracking 2025 almost month for month, and that if the pattern held, a cooldown was next on the calendar. We showed our work and everything. April closings were up 7.1% over the year before, May was up just 1.7%, and that fading momentum was exactly how last year’s slowdown started. Then June came in at 2,263 closed sales, up 13.8% from a year ago and up 10.2% from May. The strongest June in at least three years, in the month we had penciled in for the nap. This is why we report the numbers instead of predicting them. The national numbers moved too, which is new. Last month we noted Portland was running ahead while the country treaded water. NAR’s latest report shows national sales up 3.2% from a year ago, the strongest pace since December, and Realtor.com’s June data has pending sales up 3.7% nationally. So the country is finally coming along. The difference is how. Nationally, asking prices fell 2.5% in June, the steepest drop Realtor.com has recorded since 2017, meaning sellers elsewhere are buying that volume with price cuts. Portland’s median is a thousand dollars off last year and volume is rising anyway. Nobody here is paying for it.
June 2024: 2,140 closings
June 2025: 1,988 closings
June 2026: 2,263 closings
The timing makes it stranger. June was the exact month things went sideways last year. In 2025, June closings fell below the 2024 pace and stayed down through July, and that was the rerun we were braced for. Instead this June beat last June by 275 sales and cleared 2024’s June too.
The year so far
Through June, 10,920 homes have closed in the Portland metro this year, 4.3% ahead of the same stretch of 2025. That lead was 2.4% a month ago. The pipeline is stocked too: buyers had offers accepted on 2,437 homes in June, 7.5% more than last year. Accepted offers become next month’s closings, so July has a head start before it’s half over.
The obvious question is what changed in June, and the honest answer is nothing we can find. Rates sat around 6.5% all month per Freddie Mac, roughly where they’ve been since spring. No policy help, no burst of good news, plenty of loud headlines. Last month we went looking for the catalyst behind this market and came up empty. We looked again this month, still nothing, so we’re going to stop treating it as a mystery. The demand is just there, week after week, and it doesn’t seem to need a reason. This all seems a little counter-intuitive. Rates briefly touched 6% in February and then we went to war. The stock market took a nose dive and then recovered, plus some. Uncertainty, inflation, even an upcoming mid-term election indicate the real estate market should slide… but no, we’re on an upward trajectory with the exception of that median sale price number.
The median caught back up
The asterisk on this market all year has been the soft median. Through May, the year-to-date median was down 1.6% from last year, and it had us fielding a lot of are-prices-falling questions. Through June it stands at $549,000 against last year’s $550,000. A thousand-dollar gap. One good month took the scary-sounding stat and turned it into a rounding error.
June on its own came in with a median of $564,900 and an average of $644,300, both up modestly from May, and the median still 0.9% below last June. So prices aren’t taking off, and we wouldn’t tell you otherwise. They’ve stopped slipping, that’s all. Meanwhile 13.8% more homes traded hands at those prices, which tells you buyers and sellers have finally landed on the same idea of what a house is worth. It took about four years of standoff to get here.
Sellers came back
May’s big story was sellers pulling back, with new listings down 11.1% from a year earlier. That reversed in June: 3,164 new listings, up 2.2% year over year. In a typical month, more supply would nudge inventory up. Inventory went down instead, to 3.1 months from 3.6 a year ago, and total market time dropped to 55 days. Every additional listing found a buyer waiting for it.
Most of the action was where it usually is. A little over half of June’s sales closed between $400,000 and $700,000, with the $500,000 to $600,000 range the single busiest slice. The top of the market had a good month too: 31 sales over $2 million, against 14 last June. We keep an eye on that segment because it runs on confidence more than on rates, and confidence was apparently fine in June.
What to do with this
Sellers first. The question we’ve heard most for two years is whether the buyers are actually out there. June’s answer is 2,437 accepted offers in thirty days. They’re out there, and they’re careful. The flat median means they won’t follow a wish price. Homes priced right are going under contract in under two months, and the ones you see sitting are mostly priced for a market that hasn’t existed since 2022. Having an interest rate at a low percentage only works if the home still works for you. The more time that passes from those historically low (and artificially created) rates, the more people will enter the market because their needs and wants outweigh the savings that great rate brings.
For buyers, the flat headlines undersell how much company you have. Closings up 13.8% means someone else likes the same houses you do. The part working in your favor is price: the median hasn’t moved in a year, so you’re not chasing anything, and rates are the same ones every buyer since spring has had. We know plenty of people still waiting for rates in the 5s. They’ve been waiting three years now, and paying rent the whole time. It’s not necessarily about what the interest rate is. It is what you can afford to buy with what the rate is today.
The market in one sentence
More homes sold this June than in either of the last two Junes, at prices that have stopped slipping, with no help from rates or headlines. We told you last month that a market grinding higher on steady demand is more durable than a boom. June made the case better than we did.
Questions about what this means for your situation? We’re happy to walk through it.
Source: All statistics in this post are drawn from the RMLS Market Action Report — Portland Metro, June 2026. Mortgage rate figures are from Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey and are subject to change.