There are two ways to describe the US housing market.
One says this remains among the most challenging environments for buyers in history. The other says this is a buyer’s market with no post-GFC precedent.
On the surface, those appear to be mutually exclusive claims. But one can offer seemingly incontrovertible arguments for either.
Prices are at or near record highs and financing costs, while not elevated in a historical sense, are ~200bps above the post-subprime bust average. Any number of affordability metrics argue for the contention that America remains in the throes of a housing affordability crisis.
On the other hand, sellers outnumbered buyers by nearly 47% late last year.
As the figure above reminds you, that’s the largest margin in at least a dozen years and represents a stark reversal from the situation which prevailed at the height of the pandemic housing boom, when buyers predominated by around the same margin.
Rates, meanwhile, are more than 150bps off the 2023 highs, and home price growth’s undershooting inflation (and wage growth) by a fairly wide margin.
So, this is both a terrible time to buy and a great time. We have ourselves an antinomy.
With that in mind, consider the figure below, which shows you the share of all homebuyers who paid below, above or right at, list price going back 13 years.
As you can see, and as Redfin noted in the editorial accompanying the data, “nearly two-thirds of all buyers in 2025 paid less than list, the highest share since 2019.”
The share of sellers who were able to command above list was less than 23%. In 2021, that share was more than 45%.
“Homebuyers are more likely to get discounts than they were in recent years because it’s the strongest buyer’s market in recent history,” the same Redfin editorial said, flatly.
The figure above shows you the average discount among buyers who paid below list. At nearly 8%, 2025 was nearly tied for the largest discount in Redfin data back to 2012.
Of course, 8% off the median price still leaves buyers to come up with $75,000 in cash to avoid PMI, and that doesn’t count all the sundries that go along with closing and moving.
And then there’s the “small” problem of six-handle financing costs. To reiterate, that doesn’t seem onerous to anyone who did any home shopping pre-GFC, but for would-be buyers who reached adulthood post-Lehman, it feels high.
On the seller side, Redfin’s Lily Katz offered a characteristically concise assessment. “They watched their neighbor’s home sell for tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price [during the pandemic boom], and are now pricing their homes based on that,” she wrote, adding that such a mindset’s “particularly prevalent among sellers who bought their home during the peak of the pandemic market.” That cohort paid the highest prices in history, and are staring in some locales at losses if they want to sell now.
The Wall Street Journal, in a piece citing the same data, summed up the paradox. “Many home shoppers have given up on the depressed housing market, where sales are stuck at a 30-year low,” a Monday piece began. “But those buying are enjoying discounts at the highest rate in years.”
