Mission Inventory Fell in July. That Hasn’t Happened Since 2021.
Braden Koop Personal Real Estate Corporation · Koop Homes Group · REALTOR® · RE/MAX Kelowna
Across Upper Mission, Lower Mission, Kettle Valley and Crawford Estates, the number of detached homes for sale fell from 220 in June 2026 to 212 in July, and months of supply fell from six to five. In 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, both numbers rose over the same four weeks. July 2026 is the tightest July in this market since 2021, and buyers should understand what that does to their position before they write an offer this month.
Months of supply is the cleanest single measure of who has leverage. It is how long it would take to sell everything currently listed at the current pace of sales. Under about four months, sellers set the terms. Above about seven, buyers do. Between the two, neither side has an automatic advantage and the specific house matters more than the market does.
Five months of supply, in a month that normally loosens
Summer usually adds inventory in the Missions. Listings accumulate faster than the market absorbs them, and the June-to-July move is reliably upward. Except this year.
| Year | June | July | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2 | 2 | flat |
| 2022 | 6 | 9 | up |
| 2023 | 6 | 10 | up |
| 2024 | 8 | 10 | up |
| 2025 | 5 | 8 | up |
| 2026 | 6 | 5 | down |
July readings across the series: 2 in 2021, 9 in 2022, 10 in 2023, 10 in 2024, 8 in 2025, and 5 now. 2021 was a frenzy nobody should use as a baseline. Set it aside and this is the tightest July of the past five years by a clear margin.
The listing count says the same thing
Months of supply is a ratio, so it can fall because sales rose rather than because listings fell. Here the raw count moved the same direction, which makes the signal more trustworthy.
| Year | Homes for sale, July | vs prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 160 | — |
| 2023 | 208 | +30% |
| 2024 | 270 | +30% |
| 2025 | 237 | −12% |
| 2026 | 212 | −11% |
Supply peaked in July 2024 at 270 homes and has come down 21.5% in the two years since. Every month of 2026 so far has had fewer homes for sale than the same month of 2025 — seven months out of seven. That is not a one-month blip; it is a year-long trend that happened to become obvious in July.
Where this reading is weakest. These are pooled figures for these neighbourhoods, and pooling is deliberate — Crawford Estates records months with no detached sales at all, and Kettle Valley’s sample is roughly a third of Upper Mission’s, so neither carries a monthly trend claim on its own. Read this as a Missions-wide signal, not as a statement about any one street. And note the February 2026 reading of 14 months in the same series: this year has not been a straight line, and one month can still move a lot.
What tightening supply does not mean
It does not mean prices are about to jump. Five months of supply is still a balanced market by most definitions — it is a long way from the two months of 2021, when homes sold in days and conditions were routinely waived. Sellers who read this as permission to price aggressively will still sit, because the buyers active in this segment are patient and they compare.
What it does mean is that the specific advantage buyers have enjoyed since 2023 — a deep pool of choice and sellers competing against each other — is thinner than it was a year ago. Twenty-five fewer homes on the market than last July sounds small until you filter for the things people in this price tier actually want: the view, the flat lot, the pool, the walkout. Those subsets shrink much faster than the headline count.
What I would do with this
If you are buying: stop waiting for more selection to appear. It has been shrinking for a year. Decide what you actually need, and be ready to move on the right house rather than holding out for a better-supplied autumn that the last five years suggest is not coming.
If you are selling: you are competing against fewer homes than any July since 2022. That is a genuine advantage and it is the first one sellers here have had in three years — but it is an advantage in competition, not in pricing power. Five months of supply does not support a stretch price.
Either way: watch September. Autumn has added supply in every year of this series, and whether that happens again is the real test of whether July was a turn or a pause.
What each neighbourhood costs against this backdrop is in the current market report, and the live inventory these numbers describe is at Kelowna and Mission property search. If you are weighing the two largest of the four against each other, Upper Mission vs Lower Mission covers how differently they behave, and the smallest of the three that carry a usable sample is covered in Kettle Valley homes for sale.
Want to know when the right one lists?
With supply this thin, the homes worth seeing do not sit long. I can watch a specific area and send you what comes up in it.
