One in Three Home Sellers Cut Prices in This City Last Month
Price reductions surged in select U.S. markets in September as reluctant buyers forced sellers to rethink their asking prices.
Sellers across certain U.S. housing markets slashed their asking prices at a striking rate in September, with one city seeing roughly one in three listed homes receive a price cut as buyer hesitancy continued to reshape the residential real estate landscape. The trend signals a meaningful shift in negotiating power away from sellers who dominated the market during the pandemic-era boom.
Affordability pressures — still elevated mortgage rates and stubbornly high home prices — have kept many would-be buyers on the sidelines, leaving sellers with little choice but to lower expectations and, more literally, their list prices. Markets that saw the sharpest runups in home values during 2020 and 2021 appear particularly vulnerable to this correction dynamic, as those gains left prices far above what local incomes can comfortably support.
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The geographic spread of price cuts is uneven, with Sun Belt and Mountain West metros that attracted pandemic migration waves now among the most likely to show large shares of reduced listings. Sellers in these areas who priced optimistically earlier in the year are discovering that today's buyers — when they engage at all — are demanding concessions before signing contracts.
For prospective buyers who have been waiting out the market, the uptick in price reductions may represent a rare opening, even if mortgage rate relief remains uncertain. Real estate analysts caution, however, that widespread price cuts do not necessarily translate into broad affordability improvement, since rates continue to erode purchasing power significantly.
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