This southeast Washington county has the lowest home prices in the state

A 4-bedroom Victorian for just under $200,000. An updated 3-bedroom for just over that. 

These are some of the listings you’ll find in Columbia County, a rural Washington county with a population of around 4,000. The agricultural region, which is northeast of Walla Walla in the Blue Mountains, is home to Bluewood, southeast Washington’s only ski resort. 

It’s also home to the lowest median home prices and lowest median rent of any county in the state, according to data from the University of Washington. 

Over the past year, Columbia County’s resale home prices dropped by 17.5%, the most of any county. In most other places, they rose.

Steven C. Bourassa is one of the researchers who compiled that data. He said there’s no clear explanation for why the county’s housing prices declined.  “I don’t know why Columbia stands out like that,” he said. “I really can’t explain it.”

He noted that the county’s housing inventory is low. That could mean the only houses remaining on the market are of lower quality — and are therefore fetching lower prices. He also pointed out that the county’s population hasn’t been growing, which means demand probably isn’t growing either.

“It could be that, in Columbia, because there’s maybe just not enough demand for houses, the relationship between high interest rates and prices played out the way you would normally expect it to,” he said. That’s different from the rest of the U.S., where economists have been confounded by prices that keep rising despite high interest rates.

Marty Hall, one of Columbia County’s commissioners, was surprised by UW’s data. He knows people who’ve had trouble finding housing in the area, though he attributed that more to availability than cost.

That said, he wouldn’t mind if the housing prices encouraged people to check out Columbia County. Like many other rural places, he said the county has struggled to pull in new businesses and new faces that would boost the local economy.

“We work really hard to create good living wage jobs,” he said. “So, we can attract families that want to come and enroll their kids in school and play Little League baseball and join 4-H and Lions Club — all the things that make a community a community.” 

According to UW’s research, Columbia County is one of only three Washington counties where housing is considered affordable. That means someone earning the area’s median income would spend less than 25% of their monthly pay on the mortgage for a median home. 

The county’s most recent unemployment rate was 4.8%, the same as the state’s.

“We can’t compete wage-wise, but we can compete with lower cost of living,” Hall said. “And maybe a better pace of life.” 

Owen Lanning is a Realtor in Dayton, the county seat. He thinks the low prices are a boon to the region. “It’s a good thing that people can come here and afford to live comfortably and have a good life in this community,” he said. 

In his six years of selling real estate, Lanning said this fall has been his busiest. He’s even had some younger buyers coming from other parts of the state. 

Some of them work remotely; others plan to commute to Walla Walla or the Tri-Cities, where median housing costs are nearly twice as high. Lanning’s wife, Ivye, is among them. She drives roughly 30 miles to Walla Walla every workday. 

Her commute starts from the home that she and Lanning own. They bought it when she was 24 and he was 25. Now 28, Lanning said that all of his friends in the area are homeowners, too.