Redfin Confirms a Buyer's Market Nationwide: How to Negotiate Now

Redfin's own data says it plainly: sellers outnumber buyers across most of the country right now, and that imbalance hands buyers real leverage at the negotiating table. The company's weekly housing market tracker shows nearly 1.5 million homes for sale against a shrinking pool of active buyers, median days on market stretching past a month, and a large share of sellers cutting their asking price before they ever get an offer. None of that means homes are cheap. It means the rules of the conversation have changed. This guide breaks down exactly what the data shows, how to check whether your own metro fits the national pattern, and the specific negotiating moves that are working for buyers right now.
Key Takeaways
- Redfin defines a buyer's market as one where sellers outnumber buyers by more than 10%, and that condition has held nationally since May 2024.
- As of the most recent four-week tracking period, roughly 1.48 million homes were for sale nationwide while the pool of active buyers has fallen to some of its lowest levels on record.
- The median U.S. home sale price sits at a record high near $408,800, even as buyer demand cools — a sign that price and negotiating leverage aren't the same thing.
- More than a third of sellers have cut their asking price at some point this year, and the national sale-to-list ratio has slipped under 99%, meaning the average home is selling below its final list price.
- The median monthly housing payment is hovering near $2,630 to $2,650, within about $100 of the 2023 record, because mortgage rates near 6.5% are offsetting any relief from softer prices.
- Buyers in Sun Belt metros like Miami, Nashville, and much of Texas currently have the most leverage, with sellers outnumbering buyers roughly two to one in some of those markets.
 

What Redfin's Latest Data Actually Shows

Start with the plainest fact in the report: there are more homes for sale than there are people trying to buy them. Redfin's chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, put it directly in a recent housing update — in most of the country, it's a buyer's market, meaning there are more homes for sale than people looking to buy a home.
That single sentence is doing a lot of work. It's not a prediction or a forecast. It's a description of what's happening in the data right now, pulled from Redfin's weekly tracker, which covers rolling four-week periods and gets updated on a set schedule throughout the month.
Here's the snapshot from the most recent reporting periods:
- Active listings: about 1.48 million homes for sale nationwide, essentially flat week over week but still elevated compared to the past several years.
- Median days on market: 39 to 49 days depending on the exact period measured, a stretch longer than the same point last year.
- Months of supply: roughly 3.4 to 4 months nationally, with wide variation by metro — some Sun Belt markets are pushing 6+ months, which is the classic threshold for a buyer's market.
- Price drops: more than a third of sellers (35.4% in one recent month) cut their original asking price, down slightly from a record high of 36.6% but still historically elevated.
- Sale-to-list ratio: 98.3%, meaning the typical home is selling for a little less than its final asking price — a hallmark of buyer leverage.
- Pending sales: down 2.2% week over week in the most recent reading, the first decline in a month, as some house hunters stayed on the sidelines.
None of these numbers exist to be memorized. They exist to answer one practical question: does the seller across the table need this deal more than you do? Right now, in most parts of the country, the honest answer is yes.
It's worth sitting with the contradiction buried in this data, too. Prices are at record highs. The median home sale price is around $408,800, up roughly 2.3% to 2.5% year over year. That's not what a "weak" market usually looks like. But a buyer's market was never really about price — it's about who holds the leverage once two parties are actually negotiating. Prices can keep climbing slowly while buyers still win concessions, repairs, and rate buydowns, because sellers are competing against each other for a shrinking pool of qualified buyers, not because the property itself is cheap.

How Redfin Defines a Buyer's Market — and Why the Old Rules Don't Quite Apply

Redfin uses a specific, numeric definition, and it's worth knowing because it's more precise than the vague "it feels slow" version most people go by. Redfin classifies a market as favoring buyers when sellers outnumber buyers by more than 10%. A seller's market is the mirror image — buyers outnumber sellers by more than 10%. Anything inside that 10% band on either side counts as balanced.
By that measure, the U.S. as a whole has been a buyer's market since May 2024. This isn't a blip from one weird month. It's a sustained, multi-year condition, and Redfin's own economics team has been tracking the gap between buyer and seller counts as one of the most reliable signals in their entire toolkit.
There's a second, older way to size up a market: months of supply. This measures how long it would take to sell every home currently listed at the current sales pace, and it's the number most agents and appraisers grew up using.
- Below 4 months of supply: conditions tend to favor sellers.
- 4 to 6 months: a roughly balanced market.
- Above 5 to 6 months: conditions tend to favor buyers.
Redfin's own research team has flagged something important here, though: the old thresholds don't map cleanly onto today's market. Redfin's economics research lead, Chen Zhao, noted that a buyer's market has traditionally been defined as 4-6 months of supply, but that historical definition doesn't fully capture the current moment — many buyers don't feel like they're in a buyer's market at all, because prices are still near record highs and mortgage rates remain elevated. National supply recently sat around 3.7 months — the highest level in six years, and the closest the country has come to the traditional buyer's market threshold since 2019 — yet affordability still feels brutal to the people actually shopping.
That gap between the technical definition and the lived experience is the single most important thing to understand before you walk into a negotiation. You are not buying into a market where homes are cheap. You're buying into a market where the seller sitting across from you is more likely to need you than you need them. Those are two very different kinds of leverage, and only one of them is real for your purposes at the negotiating table.
A third confirming signal: the sale-to-list price ratio. This compares what a home actually sells for against its final asking price. A ratio above 100% (common in 2021 and 2022) means bidding wars are pushing prices above the list price. A ratio below 100% — where the national figure sits now, at 98.3% — means the typical buyer is successfully paying less than what's on the sign. That's not a rounding error. On a $400,000 home, the difference between a 101% ratio and a 98.3% ratio is roughly $10,800 — money that used to flow to the seller and is now staying in the buyer's pocket.

The Data Points That Matter Most for Your Negotiation

Not every statistic in a housing report is useful when you're the one writing an offer. Some numbers matter enormously; others are background noise. Here's how to weight what you're seeing.
Months of supply tells you the overall balance of power in your metro. This is the single best number to check before you decide how aggressive to be.
Days on market tells you about this specific listing. A home that's been sitting for 60 days in a market with 39-day median days on market is a signal, full stop — something about the price, condition, or presentation isn't matching what buyers are willing to pay.
Price history tells you the seller's own behavior. A listing with one or two price cuts already baked in is a seller who has already acknowledged the market moved against their original number. That's a very different conversation than a fresh listing at day one.
Sale-to-list ratio, tracked at the metro level, tells you what buyers like you are actually getting away with paying, on average, right now — not what list prices suggest.
Share of homes with price drops tells you how common concessions and reductions are becoming in a given area. When more than a third of sellers nationally are cutting price, asking for a reduction isn't an insult — it's just how the market currently works.
Redfin publishes most of this data by city and metro on its Data Center, and checking it before you write an offer takes about five minutes. Skipping that step is the most common way buyers leave leverage on the table.

How to Tell If Your Local Market Favors Buyers or Sellers

National data sets the tone, but real estate is stubbornly local. The Northeast and much of the Midwest are still behaving like seller's markets even while the national picture tilts toward buyers, largely because new construction and population growth have lagged in those regions and existing inventory stays tight. Meanwhile, the Sun Belt — Florida, Texas, and parts of the interior South and Southwest — built aggressively during the pandemic boom and is now sitting on a glut of that new supply just as buyer demand has cooled.
Here's a quick way to read your own market using the same signals Redfin tracks nationally.
Signal
Favors buyers
Favors sellers
Months of supply
Above 5-6 months
Below 4 months
Median days on market
Longer than the metro's one-year average
Shorter than the one-year average
Sale-to-list ratio
Below 100%
At or above 100%
Share of listings with a price cut
Rising, often above 30%
Falling, often below 15%
Buyer vs. seller count
Sellers outnumber buyers by 10%+
Buyers outnumber sellers by 10%+
Bidding-war rate
Low, offers rarely face competition
High, multiple-offer situations common
 
Cities with the strongest buyer's markets right now include Miami, Nashville, and a cluster of Texas metros, where Redfin has reported sellers outnumbering buyers by roughly two to one. Sellers are giving concessions in a large majority of closed sales in cities like Nashville, Charlotte, and Atlanta — meaning something beyond the sticker price got negotiated in most transactions. On the other end, cities in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, along with a handful of tighter-supply metros, are still seeing buyers compete for scarce listings, sale-to-list ratios above 100%, and concessions in the low single digits.
The takeaway: don't assume your city matches the national story. Pull your own metro's numbers from Redfin's Data Center, or ask a local agent to walk you through the same six signals in the table above. It changes how hard you should push.

Median Monthly Housing Payments: What's Actually Changed

If you only read one number before you start shopping, make it this one. The median U.S. monthly housing payment recently hit $2,647 — its highest level in a year, and just about $100 shy of the all-time high set in 2023. A separate reading a few weeks later put it at $2,633, based on a 6.49% average mortgage rate, up 1.4% year over year and the first annual increase in housing payments since the previous October.
Two forces are pushing that number up at the same time, which is unusual — normally when one eases, it takes some pressure off the other.
- Home prices are climbing slowly. The median sale price has posted several consecutive record highs this year, landing in the $403,000 to $409,000 range depending on the exact four-week window measured, up roughly 2% to 2.5% annually.
- Mortgage rates have stayed stubbornly elevated. Rates have hovered in the mid-6% range for months, occasionally dipping toward 6.4%–6.5% on encouraging economic news and ticking back up on renewed uncertainty.
Here's why that combination matters for negotiating, specifically. A buyer's market gives you leverage over price and terms, but it does very little to offset a monthly payment problem if rates stay elevated. This is exactly why Redfin's own chief economist has urged buyers to look past the sticker price entirely. Her advice: buyers should weigh their full monthly payment, not just the mortgage rate, including closing costs and other recurring costs like HOA dues, homeowners insurance, and utilities.
That's not a throwaway line. It's a negotiating strategy in disguise. If a seller won't budge $10,000 on price but will cover two points of a mortgage-rate buydown, prequalify which move actually saves you more money over the life of the loan — a rate buydown often wins by a wide margin, and it's a request most sellers in a soft market are more willing to grant than a straight price cut, because it doesn't show up as a lower comp for the neighborhood.
Demand hasn't vanished, either — it's just choosier. Pending home sales have wobbled between small weekly gains and small weekly losses over the past several months, mortgage-purchase applications have moved a percent or two in either direction depending on the week, and Google search interest in "homes for sale" has swung both up and down by high single digits month to month. Translation: buyers are still out there, comparing, waiting for the right combination of home and payment. Nobody's rushing. That patience is exactly the condition that makes negotiating leverage real instead of theoretical.

Why Sellers Outnumber Buyers Right Now

Three forces are driving the current imbalance, and understanding them helps you read individual sellers more accurately.
Elevated rates are keeping would-be buyers out. Anyone who locked in a rate below 4% during 2020 through 2022 faces a steep trade-up cost to move — sell a 3.5% mortgage and buy a new one at 6.5%, and the payment math gets painful fast. That "rate lock-in" effect has kept a meaningful slice of potential move-up and move-down buyers frozen in place, shrinking the buyer pool even as population and household formation keep growing in the background.
Sun Belt overbuilding caught up with cooling demand. Cities across Florida, Texas, and the broader Sun Belt built aggressively to meet pandemic-era migration. That new supply is now landing in a market where the migration wave has slowed, prices climbed faster than local incomes, and — in Florida specifically — rising insurance costs and climate-related risk have made some buyers hesitant regardless of price. Florida's housing inventory hit its highest level on record within the past year for exactly this reason.
Economic uncertainty is pushing some buyers to wait. Broader anxieties — inflation, job security, and geopolitical events including the recent conflict involving Iran and its effect on interest rates — have made some qualified buyers decide the timing isn't right, even when they can technically afford to buy. Redfin's own agents have pointed to this hesitancy directly, describing buyers who can afford a home but are choosing not to pull the trigger because of the broader economic mood.
None of these three forces are permanent. Rates could ease, migration could pick back up, and confidence could recover. But right now, in the middle of 2026, all three are pointing the same direction — toward more sellers than buyers, and toward buyers who show up ready to negotiate holding the stronger hand.

Negotiating Tactics That Work in a Buyer's Market

This is the part that actually changes your bottom line. A soft market only helps you if you use it. Here's what's working right now, roughly in the order most buyers should reach for them.
- Anchor below list, not at it. In a market where the average home sells below its final asking price, opening at full price leaves money on the table before negotiations even start. Use recent comparable sales — not the list prices of competing homes, which are aspirational — to justify an opening number that reflects where similar homes have actually closed.
- Ask for a rate buydown instead of, or alongside, a price cut. A seller-paid buydown that knocks half a point to a full point off your rate can save far more over several years than an equivalent price reduction, and many sellers view it as less painful than lowering the number on the listing, since a buydown doesn't become a public comp that drags down the neighborhood's next sale.
- Push for repair credits over repair completion. Asking the seller to personally handle repairs after an inspection invites delays, corner-cutting contractors, and disputes over quality. A credit at closing lets you control the work and the timeline yourself, and sellers in a soft market are often relieved to hand you a check instead of a punch list.
- Negotiate closing costs as their own line item. Separate this from price entirely. A seller who won't move on the sale price by a single dollar may still agree to cover two or three percent of closing costs, effectively lowering your cash-to-close without touching the number that shows up in county records.
- Use days-on-market as leverage, explicitly. If a listing has sat for 50 days in a market where the median is 35, say so in your offer letter or through your agent. Sellers and their agents know this number cuts both ways, and naming it signals you've done your homework.
- Time your offer around price cuts. A seller who just reduced their asking price has already signaled flexibility once. That's frequently the moment to come in with a number below even the new, reduced list — not the moment to wait for a third cut that may never come.
- Keep contingencies buyer-friendly, but don't over-ask. In a market this soft, you don't need to waive your inspection or appraisal contingency to win the home — most sellers no longer have competing offers forcing you to. Keep the protections, but don't pad your requests with unrelated demands that give the seller a reason to walk instead of negotiate.
- Request a longer close, or a rent-back, if it doesn't cost you anything. Flexibility on timeline is often free to you and genuinely valuable to a seller who's still lining up their next move. Offering it can sometimes buy you room to negotiate harder on price.
- Get pre-underwritten, not just pre-approved. A fully underwritten loan commitment (sometimes called a "verified approval" or similar, depending on lender) removes financing uncertainty for the seller almost entirely, and sellers reward that certainty with more willingness to negotiate on everything else.
- Don't be afraid to walk, and say so calmly. In a market with 1.48 million active listings, you are rarely negotiating over the only home that will work for you. A seller who senses you have no alternative will hold firm. A seller who senses you're genuinely willing to move to the next listing tends to find flexibility they didn't think they had.

How to Pull Your Own Market's Numbers Before You Negotiate

Everything in this article works better once you've checked your specific city's data instead of relying on national averages. This takes about five minutes and it's worth doing before every serious offer.
- Start with Redfin's Data Center. Search your metro or ZIP code and look at the monthly and weekly housing market pages. You're looking for four numbers specifically: months of supply, median days on market, sale-to-list ratio, and the share of listings with a price drop.
- Compare your target listing against the metro median. If the median days on market in your city is 35 and the home you're eyeing has been listed for 62 days, that gap is your opening argument, not a footnote. https://agentsgather.com/redfin-confirms-a-buyers-market-nationwide-how-to-negotiate-now/