Don’t look now, but US home prices — the bane of every American renter’s existence, or those who haven’t given over to nihilism anyway — just fell a third month, according to Redfin’s measure.

For those unfamiliar, Redfin uses a similar — but not identical — methodology as Case-Shiller to calculate their index, but the data’s more current.

The latest release showed prices fell a seasonally-adjusted 0.14% in July after slipping the prior two months as well. That might sound wholly uninteresting, but as the figure below shows, it’s actually anomalous.

In data going back nearly to 2011, this index has never declined for consecutive months. Indeed, as Redfin noted in the color accompanying the release, there have only been two other declines at all: In August of 2022 and in December of 2022.

The explanation, Redfin Senior Economist Sheharyar Bokhari said, is “simple”: There are now more sellers than buyers. “Supply is significantly outpacing demand,” Bokhari remarked. “If homeowners want to sell, they have to meet buyers where they are, which often means lowering prices.”

Regular readers are aware of the yawning, half-million disparity between buyers and sellers nationwide. The figure below shows the buyers series, again using Redfin’s data.

There are around 1.4 million buyers against nearly two million sellers, so it’s small wonder prices are beginning to tick lower. “Patient, prepared buyers can find deals that simply weren’t possible a year ago,” Bokhari went on.

Of course, prices are still sky-high and the MBA update for this week found the average 30-year fixed pretty much unchanged at 6.68%. That’s near a multi-month low, but it’s still too high for resource-constrained borrowers trying to finance $450,000. The MBA’s purchase apps index ticked up slightly on the week.

In a separate piece, Redfin noted that median mortgage payments have fallen or stayed the same for a dozen weeks in a row and at $2,631, are $200 off the record highs seen in May. That’s incrementally encouraging, but like last year, buyers are warned that assuming Fed cuts will translate into even more relief isn’t a safe bet.

“The mortgage rates that buyers can lock in today have already priced in the likelihood that the Fed will cut rates on September 17,” Redfin’s head of economics research Chen Zhao said.