The Kelowna market, measured rather than described

What the gauge is actually measuring

Months of inventory is the cleanest single read on who holds leverage. It asks one question: at the current pace of sales, how long would it take to sell every home currently listed?

Under four months, buyers compete and sellers set the terms. Over eight, the reverse. In between, the outcome comes down to the specific house, the price on it, and how it is presented.

That number moves further and faster than most people expect. In February 2021 this market had one month of inventory and homes sold in 20 days. Today it is nine months and 56 days. Same neighbourhoods, same houses, a completely different negotiation.

Use the month selector under the gauge to read any month back to January 2018. August was easy to wave off as a fire month. September is harder to explain away: inventory barely moved, 818 listings to 822, while sales dropped again and days to sell jumped from 44 to 56. There are actually fewer homes for sale than last September, 822 against 979. The difference is the buyers. There are fewer of them, and the ones still looking are taking their time.

Ten years, nineteen neighbourhoods

Every figure below is a median of real recorded sales, not an estimate and not a projection. I pull them from the Association of Interior REALTORS® MLS® System directly.

The spread is the part worth sitting with. Over the same decade, in the same city, the strongest of these neighbourhoods roughly doubled while the softest gained a little under half. Anyone who tells you “the Kelowna market” did one thing over ten years is describing an average that almost nobody actually lived.

Every area in the table now has its own guide, and its name links to it. All nineteen are on one map as well. Start with Wilden, the hill I know best, McKinley Landing, now the highest-priced of the nineteen, or West Kelowna, the largest.

How to read this without fooling yourself

A median is not your house. It is the middle of a set. Half sold for more. If your home is unusual in any direction, the median is a starting point for a conversation, not an answer.

Year to date is not a year. The 2026 column covers January through August. Comparing a partial year against full ones will mislead you, particularly in the smaller neighbourhoods where a handful of sales moves the number.

Small areas move on small numbers. Wilden and Dilworth Mountain sell a few dozen homes a year. That is why the figures here are annual rather than monthly. A single month in a small neighbourhood is noise wearing a statistic’s clothing, and publishing it as a trend would be inventing one.

What this cannot tell you is what your specific home is worth. Condition, view, lot, and timing all move a price more than any neighbourhood average does. That part needs someone to actually look at it.

What I do with this

I read these numbers every month because they change what I advise. Nine months of inventory and 56 days on market means a seller who prices to current sales is the one buyers act on, and the seller who prices for last spring waits. Homes are selling at 96.8% of list price, so the room to negotiate is real but it isn’t a fire sale. On the buying side, this is a fall where you can take a second look and write a condition without losing the house to someone who didn’t.

If you are weighing a move, the useful conversation is not about the market. It is about your house, your timing, and what the data says about the gap between them. That is what I would walk you through in how I list and market a home, and what I look for on the buying side in how I represent buyers.