Polk & Marion County Real Estate Market Report — What July 2026’s Numbers Actually Mean for You
From a 20+ Year Oregon Land Specialist Who Reads Every RMLS Report Line by Line Before Advising a Single Client Every month, RMLS publishes a Market Action Report for Polk and Marion Counties, and every month I read the whole thing — not just the headline numbers, but the price-range breakdown, the area-by-area table, and the fine print in the definitions. The July 2026 report just came out, and it tells a genuinely different story than the same report told a year ago. Inventory is climbing faster than at any point since RMLS started tracking it this way, price growth is real but has slowed to a crawl, and the market is quietly shifting away from the frantic conditions sellers got used to. Here’s what’s actually in the numbers, and what it means whether you’re selling a home, selling bare land, or trying to time a purchase. I’ve spent more than 20 years selling Oregon bare land, EFU farmland, and timberland, and one habit I’ve never dropped is reading the raw data myself instead of relying on someone else’s summary. Numbers like these drive real decisions — when to list, how to price, whether to wait — so I want you working from the same information I am. Read more: Is Bare Land a Good Investment in Oregon? The headline: more homes on the market than buyers can absorb Active residential listings in Polk and Marion Counties hit 893 in July 2026. That’s not a small increase — it’s up from 764 in July 2025 and 644 in July 2024, a jump of roughly 17% in one year and nearly 39% in two. Look at the shape of that climb below: 2024 and 2025 moved up gradually through the summer selling season. 2026 started higher and kept accelerating. More listings without a matching jump in buyer demand is exactly what pushes a market from a seller’s advantage toward something more balanced — and that’s precisely what the next number shows. Read more: How Do You Get Water, Power, and Septic on Bare Land in Oregon? Months of inventory: the real story of 2026 Months of inventory — the number of months it would take to sell everything currently on the market at the current sales pace — is the single best gauge of who has leverage in a negotiation. In July 2026, that number sat at 4.8 months, up from 3.8 in July 2025 and 2.9 in July 2024. January 2026 actually spiked to 5.9 months before settling back down through spring. A market is generally consider equal between buyers and sellers somewhere around 5 to 6 months of inventory. We’re not there yet, but 2026 has moved closer to that line than either of the two previous years got at any point. This doesn’t mean sellers have lost the advantage — it means the advantage has narrowed, and pricing a property correctly from day one matters more than it did twelve months ago, when an overpriced listing might still have found a buyer out of sheer competition for scarce inventory. Read more: Can You Get a Loan to Buy Bare Land in Oregon? Prices are still rising — just not the way they were Here’s the part that surprises people who assume more inventory means falling prices: it hasn’t, at least not yet. The average sale price in July 2026 was $484,300, up 4.5% from $463,400 in July 2025. Median sale price was $460,000, up 3.4% from $445,000. But look at the month-over-month trend instead of year-over-year, and the picture changes: average sale price actually dipped 0.5% from June 2026 to July 2026, even as median price ticked up 3.6% over the same one-month span. Zoom out further and the rolling 12-month numbers tell the calmer version of this story — average sale price is up a modest 2.4% over the trailing year ($480,200 versus $469,000), and median sale price is up just 1.1% ($445,000 versus $440,000). That’s a market still appreciating, but at a pace that looks a lot more like a normal, sustainable year than the sharp run-ups Oregon buyers got used to a few years back. Read more: What to Check Before Buying Bare Land in Oregon Where the actual sales are happening The price-range breakdown in this report is genuinely useful and most people never look at it. In July 2026, the $400,000–$500,000 band accounted for 24.1% of closed sales, up from 21.5% a year earlier — this remains the single busiest price tier in Polk and Marion Counties by a wide margin. The $600,000–$700,000 tier held essentially steady at 19.7%, while the $500,000–$600,000 tier actually cooled, dropping from 32.0% of sales in July 2025 to 23.4% in July 2026. Above $900,000, activity stayed thin but consistent — a handful of sales scattered across the upper brackets, none of it volume, all of it individually meaningful if that’s your price point. What this tells sellers: the middle of the market, roughly $400,000 to $700,000, is still where the bulk of buyer activity concentrates, and it’s where competitive, well-prepared listings move fastest. Above that range, patience and precise pricing matter even more, because there are simply fewer buyers shopping at once. New listings, pending sales, and closed sales — a market catching its breath New listings in July 2026 came in at 363, up 8.7% from July 2025 and up 9.3% from June 2026 — sellers are clearly responding to a market that still supports real prices. But pending sales dropped 8.5% year-over-year to 216, and closed sales fell 6.0% to 187. Put simply: more sellers are testing the market than a year ago, but a smaller share of listings are actually converting to accepted offers and closings at the same pace. Year-to-date through July, the same pattern holds at a larger scale. New listings for the first seven months of 2026 totaled 2,172, up 5.6% from the same period in 2025. Pending sales, at 1,465, are down just 0.7%, and closed sales, at 1,322,