Is the Housing Market really a Yo-Yo?

If you follow local real estate headlines closely, you might think the Bellingham and Whatcom County housing market is bouncing all over the place. These are recent articles from the Bellingham Herald.

June 2026 - Bellingham, Whatcom County median home prices saw a dramatic drop in April

May 2026 - Home prices jump in Bellingham, Whatcom County

February 2026 - Bellingham’s median sale price edged up again in December

January 2026 - Survey of November median home prices shows a decline locally and statewide

December 2025 - Home prices jump in Whatcom County and Bellingham, as active listings dwindle

November 2025 - Mortgage rates, home prices decline in Bellingham and Whatcom County

October 2025 - Is it the time to buy? Whatcom County home prices are down 5-10%

Is it really possible for the market to be as volatile as the headlines suggest? The main drivers of home prices are interest rates, median household income, and the supply of homes.

None of these tend to change dramatically from one month to the next, so we should be skeptical when monthly headlines suggest the market is rapidly swinging up and down.

The bigger issue is sample size.

In a smaller market, there simply are not enough sales each month to make the monthly median price a highly reliable indicator of market direction. When the sample size is small, the margin of error is larger. That means a change in the median price may reflect the mix of homes that happened to sell that month, rather than a true change in home values.

To get a more dependable sense of the market, it helps to zoom out. Rather than focusing on one month at a time, the chart below shows the Whatcom County housing market using a three-month moving average. This smooths out some of the month-to-month noise and gives a better indication of the broader trend.

The graph shows the years layered on top of each other. In May, the median price was $644,000. This is 2.5% higher than last year, but the bigger takeaway is that the market has been relatively flat, with minimal movement over the past couple of years.

That does not mean prices never change. It means the market is not swinging wildly up and down every month, even if the headlines sometimes make it sound that way.

The headline may be that the market is boring, and boring is probably a lot closer to the truth than the monthly yo-yo headlines suggest.