Market Report | Q1 of 2026

Welcome back for a another housing market report prepared by the team at Bellingham Real Estate Co. The data portion of our report is available by request to comms@bhamre.co or by reaching out to your preferred Bham RE Co broker.

Prices stagnate in Whatcom County

While individual months’ median price can fluctuate significantly due to the particular pool of houses that closed in that time frame, the story of each quarter as a whole is one of pricing stability.

In Q1 of 2026 (Whatcom County single family residential), there was a negligible price increase over Q1 of 2025 (less than 1%). Quarterly median prices have fluctuated only about 3% for the 18 months, since Q4 of 2024. The lowest rolling 3-month median price was $615,000 and the highest was $635,000.

Prices remain strong--they’re a little lower than the peak we saw in July 2022, but still higher than any point in Whatcom’s real estate sales history prior to 2022.

A surge of (cancelled) listings

Whatcom County’s new listings are up slightly (+8%) compared to Q1 of 2025, and as usual, they were weighted towards March, with a quieter January and February.

However, cancelled/expired listings are up 47% for Whatcom County and 40% for Bellingham compared to the same quarter last year. Q1 of 2026 in Whatcom County saw only 4% more new listings but three times (+200%) as many cancelled/expired listings as the same quarter in 2021, the peak of the Covid-era market.

Half of the homes that closed in Bellingham this quarter took three weeks or more to go under contract. Roughly one-fifth of listings cancelled or expired without selling.*

*this is an estimate using the number of new listings in one quarter compared to the number of cancelled/expired listings in the same quarter. These are not exactly the same data set but can illustrate a general trend.

Going into Q2, we continue to recommend that sellers (1) make repairs and perform maintenance on homes, and (2) strategically price their home for current market conditions for the best chance of competing against the other options on the market.

As always, reach out with any questions or for a consultation!

Tiffany (Holden) Ng has been preparing local market reports regularly since Q2 of 2020. She posted daily reports during Covid lockdown and recorded more than 75 livestream and video editions of her report in the two years that followed. Now she prepares a quarterly and annual overview report, looking at the larger trends of the housing market right here in Bellingham. 

Disclosure: all Bellingham Real Estate Co market reports are prepared by a Managing Broker. No AI assistance is used in the analysis, reporting or advice in these reports. Graphs are prepared in-house except where otherwise noted.