From the Desk
The Greater Palm Springs Housing Market in 2026
One Valley, Two Markets.
A luxury tier setting records while the conventional middle holds its breath — and what three years of data say about where the desert goes next.
Every spring I take the desert market apart to see what actually moved — not the headline number everyone repeats, but the machinery underneath it. This year, laying May 2024, 2025, and 2026 side by side across our core markets — Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, and La Quinta — one conclusion kept surfacing, and it reframes everything else: the Coachella Valley has stopped behaving like a single market. It's become two, sharing the same zip codes.
One market is setting records. The other is holding its breath. The trouble is they share an address — so the averages hide both.
The number that should have moved — and didn't
Valley-wide, the median detached price drifted from $710K to $700K to $675K — about 5% over two full years. That kind of stability sounds unremarkable until you see what it sat through. Inventory took a full roundtrip in the same window: up roughly 40% into 2025, then back down. A 40% swing in supply is the kind of thing that leaves a mark on price. Here, it didn't. The floor held.
That's the first clue that something more interesting is going on than "prices were flat." A market that absorbs a supply shock that cleanly has something holding it up from underneath.
Flat sales, record dollars
The second clue is the one most people get backwards. The number of homes sold stayed flat — essentially unchanged across all three years. But total dollar volume climbed to an all-time high, $708 million a month. Fewer-to-flat transactions producing more money has only one explanation: the average sale is getting bigger. And it is — because the top of the market is doing the work. Homes over $1 million went from 50% of all dollar volume to 55.6%. The luxury tier isn't just participating in this market. It's carrying it.
Two markets, four cities
Look at price per square foot across our core cities and the split comes into focus:
Detached price per square foot · Source: GPSR Desert Housing Report (Market Watch LLC), May 2024–2026.
Rancho Mirage barely moved — the luxury end held almost perfectly. La Quinta quietly became the Valley's dollar-volume leader, overtaking Palm Springs on the strength of its high end. Palm Desert, the workhorse that sells the most homes every year, softened a touch. And Palm Springs — which carries the most listings in the Valley — gave back the most on price, because that's where the supply pressure landed first. Same Valley, four different stories, and the dividing line is the price tier every time.
The market found its new normal.
There's a temptation to read "softening" as "trouble." It isn't. The clearest sign of where we are: homes selling over asking fell from 15% to under 10% — right back to where it sat before the pandemic. Homes now take about seven weeks to sell, near ask. That's not a market in distress. That's a market that remembered how to negotiate.
What I keep coming back to is how orderly all of this was. The boom didn't bust. It resolved — into two markets moving at different speeds. The desert has a buyer underneath it that most markets don't: discretionary, often cash, in no hurry, and increasingly concentrated at the top. That buyer is why the floor held through a 40% supply swing, and why dollar volume set a record while transaction counts sat still.
So when someone asks me how the desert market is doing in 2026, the honest answer is: which one? There's a luxury market quietly setting records, and a conventional market holding its breath — and the headline averages hide both. Read them as one number and you'll misjudge your timing in either direction. Read them as two, and the whole picture finally makes sense.