A wave of home sellers that flowed into the U.S. housing market over the summer has been on the ebb for months.
This trend can be partly explained by a seasonal slowdown as winter months approach, but the number of delistings has also been steadily rising for 18 months, according to Redfin. There were roughly half a million more home sellers than buyers during peak summer activity, and sellers outnumbered buyers in the market by a margin of roughly 36% in October, the home listings company reports.
The return of a buyer’s market in 2025 has come at a price, as homeownership still remains widely unaffordable for typical earners. Around 5.5% of total listings — nearly 85,000 nationwide — were pulled off the market in September, the highest rate for that month since 2016.
“That increase is bigger than it looks on paper; it represents a fairly significant jump in delistings from last year,” said Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin. “More sellers are giving up because their homes have been sitting on the market for a long time, and they don’t want to or can’t afford to settle on accepting a low price.”
Effectively self-managing what has become an abundance of stale listings in some markets, an increase in delistings can help establish a floor for home price reductions, thereby supporting higher home prices or slowing price deceleration.
A sustained trend
Sustained, rapid home price appreciation has defined the housing market for 15 years as a product of the broader economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
Median home sales prices peaked at $257,400 in the first quarter of 2007 before bottoming out at $208,400 in the first quarter of 2009, a 19% decrease, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development data.
In the decade spanning the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2020, median home sales prices rose around 44%, from $219,500 to $317,100.
Median sales prices have risen another 30% in the five years spanning the second quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2025, when the median sales price was $410,800.
Current median sales prices are down roughly 7% from pandemic-era peaks of $442,600 in late 2022, a price point 42% higher than 2007’s peak median sales price.
Cooling home price appreciation and outright losses in some markets were anticipated by economists who observed pandemic-era price gains as unsustainable.
But hesitant demand from cost-burdened buyers has spooked sellers, Redfin says, suggesting that up to 15% of the homes that were delisted in September were at risk of selling at a loss, the highest share in five years.
The lack of affordability has both narrowed access to the market for first-time homebuyers and limited the mobility of current owners, many of whom are simultaneously buyers.
Current owners with lower pandemic-era mortgage rates face the prospect of paying much higher borrowing costs on new mortgages, while possibly needing to sell their current homes above a certain threshold to capture enough equity to make a subsequent purchase viable.
Stale stock
As many as 7 in 10 home listings were considered “stale” in September, a demerit assigned to properties that have sat on the market for 60 days or more without a contract signing.
Rising property taxes and insurance costs have been outstripping principal and interest payments for mortgage holders across the country. Meanwhile, regional market fragmentation has emerged, with Texas and Florida seeing sustained home price declines, while persistent undersupply has driven moderate annual home price gains in the Midwest and Northeast.
Nicholas Godec, head of fixed income tradables and commodities at the ratings agency S&P Dow Jones Indices, recently stated that the “geographic rotation is striking,” also noting that inflation outpaced annual home price gains for the sixth consecutive month in September.
The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index recorded a 1.3% non-seasonally adjusted annual gain in September, slightly decelerating from the 1.4% rise observed in August.
National home prices had risen just 0.4% over the preceding six months, said Godec, who observed the beginning of a new market equilibrium marked by “minimal price growth,” or in some regions, “outright decline.”
At an annual conference in Houston in mid-November, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, said “home prices nationwide are in no danger of declining.”
Yun’s housing outlook for 2026 runs contrary to other housing and mortgage economists who expect home price declines will likely drive improved purchase affordability next year.
