When people ask me why home prices around here have not fallen with mortgage rates sitting near six and a half percent, I do not start with prices. I start with a number most homeowners have never looked at.
It is called months of supply, and it answers one plain question. If not a single new home came on the market starting tomorrow, how long would it take buyers to buy everything that is currently for sale. A market where buyers and sellers have roughly equal footing sits somewhere around five to six months.
Northern Virginia is at 1.5 months. That is about six weeks of homes, for a region of several million people. (Source: Bright MLS, June 2026.)
Break it down by county and it holds. Fairfax is at 1.3 months. Loudoun is at 1.4. Prince William is at 1.4. In the broad region, roughly 3,222 homes sold in the month against about 4,823 sitting active. That is not a market with a shortage of buyers. It is a market with a shortage of houses.
I want to be careful here, because low inventory gets used as a sales line and I am not using it that way. Thin supply does not mean anything you list will sell for anything you ask. Region-wide, homes are closing at about 99.7 percent of asking price and taking a median of 19 days to go under contract. Buyers are not overpaying out of panic. They are just not finding much to choose from.
The reason supply is this thin has almost nothing to do with demand and everything to do with the people who already own homes. A huge number of owners in this area are sitting on mortgages they locked at two and three percent. Moving means trading that for a loan near six and a half. So they stay, they renovate instead, and the house that would have hit the market in a normal year never does. You can see it in the local numbers. In Ashburn's 20147 zip, active listings were down 27.4 percent from a year earlier, and in 20148 they were down 47.5 percent. That is not a slow spring. That is a whole category of would-be sellers deciding to sit still.
Further out from the core, supply loosens up some. Stafford is closer to 2.0 months, Spotsylvania around 2.2, Fauquier around 2.5, and homes there are taking 35 to 38 days to go under contract instead of 19. Still tight by historical standards, but a genuinely different experience for both sides of the table.
So what do you do with this.
If you own a home in the close-in counties and you have been putting off a move because you assume you would be one of a hundred listings competing for attention, that assumption is a couple of years out of date. In most of these neighborhoods you would be competing with a handful of homes, not a wall of them. That is worth knowing before you decide to wait another year.
If you are buying, the hard truth is that waiting for inventory to pile up has been a losing strategy for four years running. It might change. Rates could come down enough to shake loose the owners who are sitting on cheap mortgages, and if that happens you will see supply and competition rise at the same time. But betting on a flood of choices is a bet the last four years have not rewarded.
And if you just want to know what months of supply looks like in your specific neighborhood, that is a small enough question that I am happy to pull it and tell you. Call or text me at 571-496-9009. No appointment, no pitch, just the number for your street.