Just over 41% of active single-family home listings nationwide had their asking price cut at least once during the week ending August 7, according to HousingWire’s weekly market data. That’s 41.44%, to be precise, nearly identical to the 41.85% recorded during the same week in 2025, which was itself a record pace for price reductions. Two years ago, a price cut on nearly half of all listings would have signaled a market in real trouble. In 2026, it is just Tuesday. The year-over-year gap has actually narrowed sharply, from 1.34 percentage points eight weeks earlier to just 0.41 points now, meaning sellers are cutting prices at a rate that is catching up to, not falling behind, last year’s record.
The reasons aren’t mysterious. Mortgage rates have been stuck above 6.5% for most of the year, inventory has been rebuilding in market after market, and buyers who can wait are waiting. A seller who lists at last spring’s price and expects last spring’s bidding war is, increasingly, the one adjusting the number three weeks later. The four markets below show how differently that pressure is landing depending on how much new supply a metro is absorbing and how fast.
- The national number: 41.44%, and closing in on last year’s record. Nearly four in ten active listings have taken at least one price cut, per HousingWire. The share is essentially flat compared to the same week last year, but the trend line matters more than the single number: the year-over-year gap has shrunk from 1.34 percentage points to 0.41 in just two months, putting 2026 on track to match or beat 2025’s record for how often sellers blink first.
- San Antonio: half of all listings have already been marked down. At 50.68%, San Antonio has the steepest price-cut rate of any market in the data, up 6.37 percentage points from a year ago. Inventory there sits at 16,046 active listings, roughly flat year-over-year, while new pending sales are down 9% and the median active listing sits at $335,000. Supply isn’t the problem here so much as demand pulling back — buyers simply are not showing up fast enough to absorb what is already sitting on the shelf, so sellers keep chasing the market down.
- Minneapolis: cuts are climbing even as buyers move faster. Minneapolis’s price-cut share rose to 37.69%, up 2.64 points from last year, and inventory is up a sharp 22.3% year-over-year to 6,655 homes with a median list price of $509,000. Yet absorbed listings, meaning homes actually going under contract, jumped 16.9%, and new pending sales rose 8.7%. That combination is the more interesting story: sellers are pricing more cautiously even though demand has not dried up at all, most likely because there is simply more competition sitting on every block than there was twelve months ago, so even eager buyers have leverage to negotiate down from the first number.
- Kansas City: the one market bucking the trend. Kansas City’s price-cut rate actually fell to 35.12%, down a full 7.45 points from 42.57% a year ago, even as inventory grew 21.2% to 5,598 active listings and the median list price landed at $423,245. Absorbed listings there are up 5.4% year-over-year, even as new pending activity slipped 6.7%. That’s a metro where sellers appear to be pricing more realistically the first time around, skipping the cut-and-wait cycle that’s dragging out timelines elsewhere.
- What it means if you’re buying or selling this fall. For buyers, a price cut is leverage: it signals a seller who has already recalibrated expectations and may be more open to negotiating on closing costs, repairs, or a flexible timeline. It’s also worth asking an agent for a listing’s full price history, not just the current number, since a home that’s been cut once already has shown its hand. For sellers, the data is a warning against overpricing out of the gate. Homes priced ambitively in a market where 41% of competitors are already cutting tend to sit through the best weeks of buyer traffic, then get cut anyway once that early attention has already burned off.
- The bigger picture: this isn’t a crash, it’s a correction in buyer power. None of this data points to falling home values on a national scale — it points to a market where list prices are no longer landing where they used to on the first try. Sellers who priced for the frenzy years of 2021 and 2022 are discovering that today’s buyers, facing mortgage rates well above 6.5%, simply do the math and wait for the number that fits their budget instead of stretching for the asking price.
The pattern across all three metro examples is the same underlying story wearing a different local accent: inventory is up almost everywhere, and the sellers who price for the market they wish they had, instead of the one that actually exists, are the ones who end up in the 41%.