The housing market typically doesn’t see a lot of movement in the middle of winter in Yellowstone County, and this January is no different.
“February, March, April is when a lot of people decide they are going to start to make a change,“ says Laura Drager, the new president of the Billings Association of Realtors.
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“For some reason, people don’t like to move in the wintertime,” she adds with a laugh.
But Drager believes that will change soon.
“I think that the industry across the nation is going to pick up. We are already seeing the inventory in the Billings area picking up,” she says.
Inventory, or lack of it, had been the big story in some recent years. During the pandemic, homes seemed to be flying off the market at one point—sometimes even sight unseen.
“I personally had properties where I was seeing between five and ten offers come in on a property, and it was difficult sometimes for the sellers to choose. Sometimes who they were interested in completing the transaction with,” she recalls.
In 2021, the median time that a home was on the market in Yellowstone County was just five days.
“One of the things we have seen is that the days on market has slowly crept up,” Drager says.
It rose to 25 days last year, a slower but still strong market with a median sales price of $379,000 for the county—the same as it was in 2024. Sellers received 98.3 percent of their listed price.
The median residential sales price for the 29 counties that are served by the Billings Association of Realtors was $369,900 in 2025.
Many prospective home buyers have also been keeping an eye on interest rates, which dipped back to near a three-year low this week. Drager calls that another encouraging sign as we move closer to spring.
“I think, like I said, it will open up that pool of buyers, and I think it’s going to be a great opportunity for home ownership,” she says.
