Remember: It’s only a buyer’s market if you can afford to buy.
US home prices should be falling. Or, if property values are going up, the rate of appreciation should be decelerating.
After all, sellers outnumber buyers by nearly 60% nationwide, and by as much as 2.4:1 depending on the locale. Ostensibly, that gives buyers enormous leverage.
Of course, concessions needn’t necessarily mean outright price cuts, but when buyers are as scarce as they are in 2026, well-qualified house-hunters would be crazy to come in at list. And motivated sellers are more likely to lower their asking price if a given home sits on the market for too long.
The figure above, which uses data from Redfin, shows you the prevalence of concessions in Augusts going back to the onset of the pandemic.
Redfin excludes price cuts for the actual property, counting only “money toward repairs, closing costs and/or rate buydowns.” “With more homes for sale and fewer buyers competing for them, sellers are increasingly willing to offer incentives to get deals across the finish line,” Dana Anderson remarked.
That may go some of the way towards explaining why prices remain firm. According to an update from Redfin that grabbed a few headlines on Tuesday, national prices rose 3.7% YoY last month.
As the figure shows, August’s annual rate (in blue) was the quickest in over a year, and it’s at odds with — i.e., counterintuitive in the context of — the widening gap between sellers and buyers (in white).
In the editorial accompanying Tuesday’s update on price growth, Redfin’s Anderson described demand as still “sluggish due to elevated housing costs and economic uncertainty.” And yet, “sale prices continue to rise,” she said, “partly because many homeowners have substantial equity and little incentive to accept a steep discount if they put their home on the market.”
So, there are a number of factors supporting prices here despite the paucity of buyers. Nearly half of home deals in August included concessions that didn’t involve cuts to listing prices or buyers negotiating for a lower price. And sellers who can’t lure buyers with concessions would rather stay in their home than cut the price by enough to get a deal done.
But coming full circle, the main factor keeping prices supported is, ironically, the fact that houses are so expensive. If the math doesn’t work regardless — and that’s the situation for a lot of American renters — it doesn’t matter how good the deal might be if it did.
