New data from the Richmond Association of Realtors covering January 2020 to April 2025 shows that new home listings in the City of Richmond are at their highest since 2021, and active listings are the highest in five years.
The housing market is in crisis both in Richmond and nationwide, caused by a supply shortage of over 4.5 million homes. Laura Lafayette, the association’s CEO, told VPM News that in the last four years, the median price of a home in the Richmond metro area has increased 50% — and the income needed to afford a median-priced home has doubled.
Lafayette said the Richmond metro area has been a seller’s market for at least a decade, and even more so following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — when the region took in large numbers of people moving from Northern Virginia in search of a lower cost of living.
The Richmond metro area added approximately 52,000 new residents between 2020 and 2024, according to estimates from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
Lafayette said the city has 1.8 months of supply, which refers to the amount of time it would take for all homes currently on the market to sell. She said a market is not considered “balanced” until there are at least four months of supply.
“As long as you’re seeing numbers substantially south of four months, the seller is at an advantage,” Lafayette said.
Most buyers in the area also aren’t getting deals, having to make offers at or above the list price. So far in 2025, the average buyer is paying the full list price — which is down from peaks as high as 106% of the asking price in the summer of 2022, but still above pre-pandemic levels; buyers paid just over 97% of asking on average in 2017. Buyers are also waiving conditions like inspections to make their offers more attractive.
“You can imagine what it’s like to fall in love with a house seven times over, and that’s what it takes for you to get a contract. You can be fatigued in this process,” Lafayette said.
National consumer confidence has ebbed to its lowest level since October 2011, according to the Consumer Confidence Survey. Lafayette said that usually leads to an expectation that buyers will pull back from the market, but that is not happening in Richmond.
“There’s so much demand in our region that we don’t think we’ll see that pullback,” Lafayette said.
Lafayette said the pressure on Richmond’s housing market is unlikely to reach an equilibrium where buyers and sellers are on an even playing field anytime soon.
“I’m not rooting for buyers over sellers,” Lafayette said. “I’m just saying that we haven’t had a balanced market in years, and I don’t know anyone who’s projecting that the inventory trend line is going to change substantially.”
