Why West Plains Home Values Are Climbing While Its Warehouses Sit Empty

If you drove out Highway 2 past Airway Heights this summer, you would have seen two things that don't seem to belong in the same sentence. One is a 205,000-square-foot headquarters going up for King Beverage at 3520 South Geiger Boulevard, on track for an October 2026 finish. The other, a few miles in either direction, is roughly 1.72 million square feet of industrial space sitting empty, dark loading docks and unleased signage on buildings that were supposed to be full by now.

Meanwhile, when Spokane County mailed its 2027 property tax assessments on June 1, 2026, the numbers told a third story again. Residential parcels in the West Plains, along with Spokane Valley and Millwood, posted the sharpest year-over-year value increases anywhere in the county, well above the countywide average gain of 0.83 percent. If you're comparing West Plains against South Hill or Liberty Lake right now, that combination, rising home values next to a half-empty warehouse district, is worth understanding before it shapes your offer.

Two Numbers From the Same Stretch of Highway

The instinct is to connect these dots into one story: warehouses bring jobs, jobs bring rooftops, rooftops bring rising values. It's a clean explanation. It's also not quite what happened here.

The West Plains industrial vacancy rate sat near 19.3 percent as of the second quarter of 2026, the direct result of a construction wave between 2022 and 2024 that outran actual tenant demand. Developers built ahead of leases, betting on continued e-commerce growth after Amazon's original 2.6 million-square-foot fulfillment center opened on Geiger Boulevard in 2020. Some of that bet paid off. A lot of it didn't, at least not yet.

At the same time, residential values in the same submarket kept climbing. That's not two halves of one economy moving together. It's two separate markets that happen to share a zip code, responding to different pressures on different timelines.

What the Vacancy Number Actually Hides

Look closer at that 19.3 percent and the picture gets more specific. Vacancy in select infill and data-center-adjacent segments of the West Plains sits as low as 2.1 percent, exceptionally tight for the right product type. The oversupply is concentrated almost entirely in large speculative big-box space built for tenants who never signed. Smaller, specialized, and well-located industrial product is still scarce.

That distinction matters for how you read King Beverage's new headquarters. It isn't a sign that the vacancy problem is solved. It's a sign that discriminating tenants and regional players still see enough in West Plains fundamentals, proximity to Spokane International Airport, Interstate 90 access, comparatively low land costs, to commit capital even in a soft leasing environment. The overhang and the confidence are both real. They just describe different corners of the same submarket.

The Job Count That Doesn't Swing With the Season

Here's the part that actually explains the residential number. When people credit warehouse jobs for home value growth, they're crediting the wrong employer.

Warehouse staffing is built to flex. When Amazon's fulfillment center opened in 2020, it was designed around exactly that kind of swing, launching with roughly 1,500 workers and ramping toward 3,000 during peak season before contracting again once the holidays passed. That's a legitimate economic engine, but it's not the kind that underwrites a mortgage with confidence. A household planning to buy a house is not typically planning around a job that doubles and halves every year.

Fairchild Air Force Base is a different kind of employer entirely. Team Fairchild, which includes the 92nd Air Refueling Wing, the Washington Air National Guard's 141st Air Refueling Wing, the 336th Training Group, and other tenant units, totals close to 11,868 active-duty, Guard, and tenant personnel, according to the base's own fact sheet. That payroll doesn't respond to Black Friday. It responds to congressional appropriations and long-range fleet decisions, including Fairchild's slated arrival of KC-46 Pegasus tankers as the Air Force modernizes its aerial refueling fleet. It's slower to grow, but it's also slower to shrink, and it has anchored West Plains housing demand for decades longer than any distribution center has existed.

Add in the aerospace manufacturing cluster that has grown up around the base and the airport, and you get a local economy with more than one leg to stand on. West Plains retail rents averaged $18.45 per square foot in the first quarter of 2026, a figure tied directly to that mix of airport, base, and aerospace tenants rather than to warehouse headcount alone.

Why Builders Never Really Stopped

The other piece of the residential story is supply-side, and it has nothing to do with warehouses at all. Builders have kept active in the West Plains corridor because entry-level lot costs there have historically run below the rest of Spokane County, and that math hasn't changed enough to push them out.

D.R. Horton is actively building at Needham Hill in Cheney, a 69-homesite community with floor plans ranging from roughly 1,317 to 2,002 square feet of living space, and at Hunters Crossing in Airway Heights, where homes start in the mid-$300s. That kind of continued entry-level construction keeps the West Plains liquid at price points that South Hill and Liberty Lake largely can't match right now, which is part of why the value trend line here looks different from the rest of the county.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The West Plains Subarea Planning effort, a coordinated project involving the City of Spokane, Airway Heights, Cheney, Medical Lake, Spokane County, the airport, and Fairchild itself, has spent years aligning infrastructure and capital planning across jurisdictions specifically because growth here doesn't respect city limits. That kind of multi-agency coordination is unusual, and it's part of why building has been able to keep pace at all.

Reading the Signal Correctly

If you're comparing the West Plains to South Hill or Liberty Lake, the practical takeaway is this: don't use warehouse vacancy as a proxy for residential health here, and don't use warehouse headlines as a proxy for residential risk either. They're measuring different things. The number that actually predicts where West Plains home values go next is closer to Fairchild's mission timeline and local lot economics than it is to Amazon's quarterly hiring plans.

For buyers, that means the West Plains still offers something increasingly rare in Spokane County: new construction at accessible price points, backed by an employment base with real staying power. For sellers, it means your comp set should lean on assessor and closed-sale data specific to this submarket rather than county-wide averages that get pulled around by very different neighborhoods.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the empty warehouse space eventually drag down nearby home values? There's no evidence in current data that it's doing so now, and the mechanisms driving each market are largely separate. Industrial leasing responds to freight and logistics demand; residential demand here has tracked more closely with base employment and new construction activity.

Does the King Beverage project mean more warehouse jobs are coming to the area? It signals continued investor confidence in specific, well-located industrial product, but industrial asking rents in the region were flat year-over-year as of the first quarter of 2026. A single large project is not the same as a broad hiring wave.

Is the West Plains still a realistic option for entry-level buyers in 2026? Yes. Builders including D.R. Horton are actively selling new homes in Cheney and Airway Heights starting in the mid-$300s, a price band that's increasingly hard to find elsewhere in Spokane County.

The West Plains rewards buyers and sellers who read past the headline. If you're weighing a move here against South Hill, Liberty Lake, or another Spokane County submarket, SpokaneREAL can walk you through the comps that actually apply to your situation. Schedule a private market consultation and we'll help you separate the signal from the noise before you write an offer.