The deals are still falling through. Home deals I mean.

When pending home sales fall out of contract in a market where sellers outnumber buyers by a wide margin, it’s easy enough to cite that disparity as the likely culprit.

If I’m a well-qualified buyer and I know people like me are relatively scarce, I can push for more concessions from the seller, whether that means going in way under ask or, you know, demanding a new interior paint job. (Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating how much it costs to have the interior of a large home professionally painted.)

While it’s certainly true that buyer leverage goes a long way towards explaining why deal cancelations are piling up across the US housing market, there are two additional factors worth considering.

First, sellers haven’t accepted the reality of their situation and so aren’t amenable to the concessions buyers are demanding. That’s likely creating “accidental” cancelations, where that means what’s normally a negotiation is turning into a mutual “go pound sand” situation. Sellers probably underestimate buyers’ willingness to walk and buyers underappreciate (or don’t care about) the extent to which their demands would force some sellers to take a loss.

Second, the affordability calculus is so vexing for many buyers that even the slightest change in circumstances or rates makes the difference between the math working or not. In other words: The margin for error when it comes to timing the rate-lock, getting enough equity out of an existing home sale to roll into the new purchase and so on, is very small.

Whatever the case, some 42,000 home-sale agreements fell through last month on Redfin’s count.

As the figure shows, that was nearly 14% of homes that went under contract, a record for February in data going back nearly a decade.

Note that cancelations in January also notched a record for that month and in December, nearly 16% of purchase agreements fell through, a record for any month.

The figure below shows you the whole series. Do note: Seasonality matters here, and it matters a lot. Although the share of cancelations fell from December early this, that’s meaningless: The share of cancelations is almost always elevated at year-end. This data must be compared to the same month.

Long story short, we’re making record after record on this particular statistic.

In some entertaining color accompanying the February data, released earlier this week, one Redfin agent from Orlando said he’s seen buyers “make an offer but never send the deposit because they [got] nervous.” In other cases, buyers are behaving irrationally when it comes to inspection items. “Maybe they ask for a brand-new roof because three shingles are missing,” he told Dana Anderson.

Of course, the war’s not going to help this situation. As discussed here on Wednesday, rates are up 35bps since the US began bombing Iran late last month. “Some buyers who made an offer when rates were near a four-year low in February may have suddenly faced a higher rate when it came time to lock it in,” Anderson added.