Virginia Housing Market Analysis: The Last 16 Quarters in Data

Virginia home prices rose 21.2% over the 16 quarters from Q3 2022 through Q2 2026, according to the FHFA All-Transactions House Price Index for Virginia retrieved from FRED, and they were still climbing 3.8% year over year as of Q2 2026. The median listing price statewide was $468,333 in Q2 2026, per Realtor.com inventory data retrieved through FRED, essentially flat against a year earlier at -0.3%. The supply side is where the market has changed most: active listings averaged 21,747 in Q2 2026, up 46.1% from Q3 2022. The short version: prices are still rising but at the slowest annual pace in four years, asking prices have stalled near their peak, and buyers have roughly half again as many homes to choose from as they did when this window opened.

How Virginia Home Prices Have Moved

The FHFA index for Virginia opened this window at 644.5 in Q3 2022 and closed at 780.9 in Q2 2026, a gain of 21.2% in four years. The path only bent downward once: the index slipped from 644.5 to 642.0 between Q3 and Q4 2022, the same stretch in which the Freddie Mac 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Average jumped from 5.62% to 6.66% in a single quarter. That was the only quarterly decline in the entire 16-quarter run.

What changed dramatically is the pace. Year-over-year growth peaked at 13.6% in Q3 2022, the tail end of the pandemic-era run-up. It then decelerated fast: 10.6% in Q4 2022, 8.8% in Q1 2023, and 5.8% by Q2 2023. Growth then stabilized, holding between 6.0% and 7.2% through 2023 and 2024, with a local high of 7.2% in Q1 2024 even though mortgage rates averaged 6.75% that quarter. A second slowdown arrived in 2025: 5.8% in Q1, 4.5% in Q2, then 4.3% for two straight quarters. By Q2 2026 annual growth sat at 3.8%, the slowest reading in the window and well under a third of the pace from four years earlier.

Two things are worth holding at once. Virginia never posted a negative year-over-year quarter in this window, so the index itself kept setting new highs. And the deceleration has now run six consecutive quarters, from 5.8% in Q1 2025 down to 3.8% in Q2 2026. Prices are rising; the rise keeps getting smaller.

What Homes Are Listed For

Asking prices tell a choppier story than the FHFA index. The Realtor.com median listing price series follows a strong seasonal rhythm in Virginia: medians peak each spring and sag each winter. Inside that rhythm, the trend flattened in the middle of the window. The median asking price averaged $431,498 in Q3 2022 and reached $455,000 by Q2 2023. Then 2024 went sideways. Year-over-year readings turned negative for three straight quarters: -1.7% in Q2 2024, -1.0% in Q3 2024, and -0.2% in Q4 2024.

The peak for the whole window came in Q2 2025 at $469,621. A year later, in Q2 2026, the median stood at $468,333, down 0.3% year over year and just below that peak. The most recent monthly reading, July 2026, came in at $469,450. So sellers are listing near the highest levels of the past four years, but the growth in asking prices has essentially stopped. That is a different picture than the steady gains in the transaction-based FHFA index, and the gap between the two is one of the tensions in this data.

How Many Homes Are on the Market

This is where the Virginia market has genuinely changed. The Realtor.com active listing count, retrieved through FRED, averaged 14,888 in Q3 2022 and bottomed at 10,535 in Q1 2023, the leanest quarter in the window. From there, inventory rebuilt almost without interruption. It crossed 16,000 in Q3 2024, hit 19,128 in Q2 2025 on a 43.0% year-over-year jump, and reached 21,747 in Q2 2026. Across the full 16 quarters, active listings are up 46.1%, and the July 2026 monthly count was higher still at 24,314.

For a seller, inventory is leverage, and the direction matters as much as the level. When Virginia had 10,535 homes on the market in early 2023, a listed house competed with few alternatives, and buyers had little room to push back. With more than double that inventory in Q2 2026, buyers can compare, wait, and ask for concessions, and each listing shares buyer attention with far more competitors than at any other point in this window. None of that predicts where prices go next, and this page makes no forecast. It simply describes the negotiating table as the data shows it.

What Homes Are Worth in Virginia's Largest Cities

Statewide numbers hide a lot of variation, so here is the same window at street level. The table shows the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), a smoothed, seasonally adjusted estimate of the typical home value in the city proper (not the wider metro area), for Virginia's five largest cities as of Q2 2026, with the baseline each change is measured against.

Virginia Beach is the strongest of the five right now, with typical values up 3.2% year over year. Norfolk sits at the other end at 0.9%. The quarter-by-quarter city numbers, with the same up and down markers, are in the quarterly reports listed further down this page.

Sales, Supply, and Pending Deals

Prices tell you what homes are worth; transactions tell you whether anything is actually moving. Per the Redfin market tracker (all residential, not seasonally adjusted), completed sales in Virginia averaged 10,719 homes a month in Q2 2026 (up 0.2% from the same months a year earlier), with pending sales running 12,900 a month. The median sale price, what buyers actually paid, averaged $493,800, up 3.7% year over year. At the current sales pace the market holds 2.3 months of supply, which by the common rule of thumb is seller's market territory, and the typical home that sold went under contract in 30 days. Redfin figures for Q2 2026 reflect April and May, the months reported so far; year over year comparisons use the same months a year earlier.

*Partial quarter; see the note above. All change markers compare against the year-earlier baseline shown beneath them.

The Numbers, Quarter by Quarter

All four series, averaged to calendar quarters:

What This Means If You're Selling

More listings usually means more patience, or more preparation

With active listings up 46.1% over 16 quarters, the houses that move quickly are the ones that stand out on price or condition. The rest wait. More competition generally shows up as more days on market, more showings before an offer, and more negotiation over inspection items. Virginia is not alone in this; the same broad pattern of cooling growth and rebuilding inventory shows up in the national market too. If your timeline is flexible, the rhythm in the listing data suggests sellers cluster their asking prices highest in spring quarters. If your timeline is not flexible, plan around the fact that 21,747 other listings were competing for buyers in Q2 2026.

The equity built since 2022 is the quiet good news

A 21.2% rise in the state price index over four years means most Virginia owners who bought before this window are holding meaningfully more equity than they were in mid-2022, and the index never posted a negative year-over-year quarter along the way. Equity is options. It can absorb a repair credit, cover the price adjustment that gets a stale listing moving, or make a fast as-is sale workable where the math would not have worked in 2022.

Condition still decides which buyers show up

Mortgage rates averaged 6.41% in Q2 2026, so financed buyers are stretched, and stretched buyers gravitate to move-in ready homes. A house that needs a roof, major systems, or a full cleanout is not really competing against the whole market; it is competing for the small slice of buyers willing to take on a project, inside a pool of more than 21,000 active listings. If that describes your property, selling as-is is less about squeezing the last dollar and more about reaching the buyer pool that will actually close.

That is the gap we work in. EZ Time Home Buyers makes written cash offers within 24 hours on Virginia houses in any condition, closes in 2-3 weeks, and charges no fees or commissions. If the house is in decent shape and you have some time, our Retail Buyer Program typically nets more than a typical cash offer. Start with where we buy in Virginia, or request an offer and weigh it against what the open market, as described above, is actually offering you.

Quarterly Market Reports

Every quarter in this analysis has its own report page with that quarter's index reading, listing data, mortgage rate, and city values, including the quarters where the story was very different from today's:

• 2022: Q3 · Q4
• 2023: Q1 · Q2 · Q3 · Q4
• 2024: Q1 · Q2 · Q3 · Q4
• 2025: Q1 · Q2 · Q3 · Q4
• 2026: Q1 · Q2

Data and Methodology

• House prices: FHFA All-Transactions House Price Index for Virginia (VASTHPI), retrieved from FRED.
• Asking prices: Realtor.com Housing Inventory: Median Listing Price in Virginia (MEDLISPRIVA), retrieved from FRED.
• Inventory: Realtor.com Housing Inventory: Active Listing Count in Virginia (ACTLISCOUVA), retrieved from FRED.
• Mortgage rate context: Freddie Mac 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Average (MORTGAGE30US), retrieved from FRED.
• City home values: Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), all homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted, city level, retrieved August 26, 2026.
• Sales, pending sales, months of supply, and days on market: Redfin market tracker (monthly, all residential, not seasonally adjusted); transaction counts shown as monthly averages within each quarter, retrieved August 26, 2026.
• Sales, pending sales, months of supply, and days on market: Redfin market tracker (monthly, all residential, not seasonally adjusted); transaction counts shown as monthly averages within each quarter, retrieved August 26, 2026.
• Monthly series are averaged to calendar quarters.
• Data retrieved August 26, 2026. This page reports historical data; it is not a price forecast or investment advice.