We pulled twelve years of showing activity for the Portland Metro. The busy season starts earlier than you think, the quiet one isn’t what everyone names, and the number of buyers out looking tells you less than you’d expect.

This Sunday is Father’s Day (congratulations to us). If you have a home on the market, you might assume it’s a throwaway day for showings. Nobody tours houses on Father’s Day, right?

For most of the past decade, that assumption was wrong. The third Sunday in June looked a lot like any other June Sunday. Buyers still came out. Dad got his brunch, and then somebody went to go look at a house.

We know this because of a number most people never see.

A signal most people never see

Every time an agent opens a lockbox to show a home, it leaves a timestamp. Across the Portland Metro, those add up to a daily count of how many times buyers are walking through front doors. RMLS has tracked it since 2013. Most market reports lean on closed sales and median price, which tell you what already happened, usually a month or two ago. Showing activity is different. It is buyers in the act of deciding, in real time.

We went back through twelve years of it. It confirmed a few things experience already taught us, and it reframed one.

The shape of the year

The spring market doesn’t start in spring. It starts in February. Activity steps up after the new year, climbs through March and April, and peaks in May. That May peak is the busiest the market gets all year.

Then comes the part people get wrong. It stays strong. Buyers keep touring all summer, vacations and all. Activity holds near its high through July, eases a little in August, and dips in September as school starts and attention turns toward fall.

And then October does something worth noticing. Showings bump back up. There is a reason for it. October is the last realistic window to find a home, close, and be moved in before the holidays, and to land the purchase inside the tax year. The buyers out in October tend to be on a deadline. After that, the year winds down to the December low, which is the real slow season, not summer. A typical July sees nearly twice the showing activity of a typical December.

Holidays inside that calendar mostly don’t move the needle the way people expect. Father’s Day is the example we opened with: for most of the past decade it looked like a normal June Sunday. The exception is recent. The last two years it has run about a third quieter, and Mother’s Day with it. That is less about the holiday and more about a market that has cooled and grown more selective, which is the bigger story here.

When is the best time to list?

Here is the thing the data can’t tell you on its own: whether any of this makes a given month a good time to list.

Showing counts measure how many buyers are out. They say nothing about how serious those buyers are. Those are not the same thing.

December traffic is light. But the people house-hunting on a short, rainy December afternoon are not out kicking tires and living out an HGTV daydream. They are looking because they have a reason. A job that starts in January. A lease ending. A family change. A sale that has to close. Fewer buyers, but more purpose. And with fewer homes on the market competing for their attention, a well-presented listing can stand out more in a quiet month than it would in the May crowd.

That is the judgment piece, and it is why “when should I list” never has a one-size answer. It depends on your home, your timeline, and what you are trying to do. The data sets the stage. It doesn’t make the decision.

Demand is hard to kill

The other thing twelve years makes clear is how resilient buyer demand is. When something disrupts it, it bends, then snaps back.

In spring 2020, showings fell by about half almost overnight. By that August, they were running above a normal August. The demand didn’t vanish. It deferred, then came back stronger. In January 2024, an ice storm shut the region down for the better part of a week, and showings dropped roughly 85 percent for about five days. Within a week of the thaw, they were back to normal. A storm, a shock, even a pandemic moves buyers around on the calendar. It doesn’t make them stop wanting a home.

The part that actually changed

Here is what is genuinely different in 2026, and it is on the supply side.

Back in 2021, Portland had less than a month of inventory. If nothing new came on the market, every home for sale would have been gone in about three weeks. That is why those years felt frantic: ten offers, waived inspections, prices climbing by the week.

That market is over. Inventory has rebuilt to about three and a half months, roughly four times the 2021 low, and back to where it sat in 2013 and 2014. At the same time, buyer traffic has stayed strong. Showings this spring are running ahead of last year. Put those two facts together and you get a word we haven’t used about Portland in a while: balanced. Buyers are active, and there is finally enough on the market for them to choose from.

What it means for you

If you’re buying, this is the most room you have had in years. More homes to compare, more time to think, and a little more leverage to negotiate than the headlines about a housing shortage would suggest. The trade-off is that the good ones still move, because the demand is real.

If you’re selling, the buyers are there, and showing activity is near its seasonal high. But this is not 2021. You can’t name a price and wait for a bidding war to bail you out. Homes that are priced right and show well still sell well. Homes that aren’t priced right sit, and a home that sits gets noticed. Getting the price correct out of the gate matters more than it has in years.

None of this is a swing in either direction. Flat prices with steady, healthy buyer traffic is not a weak market. It is a functioning one. After several years of extremes, that is the headline.

We read this data every month, for the metro and down through the Willamette Valley, because it tells us what is happening before the closed-sale numbers catch up. If you’re weighing a move in Portland, the eastside, the suburbs, or anywhere we cover, we’re happy to walk through what it means for your specific situation and your specific timing. No pitch, no pressure.

A word on AI: this sort of post requires leaning heavily into AI.  We’re looking at over 4000 cells of data and coming up with meaningful information in hours, not days.  There are agents publishing blog post written by AI that are machine published that never get human review before they are on the web.  They’re written for search engines, not informing people. We use AI as leverage, not as a replacement for critical thinking or tool to produce stuff for productions sake.

Source: RMLS Market Action Report and RMLS SentriLock lockbox activity, Portland Metro. RMLS data reflects activity reported to the Regional Multiple Listing Service.