New listings hit their highest weekly level in roughly four months, rising 5.8% year-over-year, even as pending home sales slipped to their lowest point since March, according to Redfin’s latest weekly housing market update.
Key Points
- New listings rose 1.2% week-over-week and 5.8% year-over-year, reaching their highest level in months.
- Pending home sales fell 1.3% week-over-week and 2.4% year-over-year, hitting their lowest point since March.
- The median sale price was $401,182, up 1.8% year-over-year, while the median asking price dipped 0.1% — its first year-over-year decline since January.
- 20.8% of listings now carry a price reduction.
- Months of supply sit at 3.8, just under the 4-to-5-month range Redfin considers balanced between buyers and sellers.
What’s Driving More Sellers to List Now
The rise in new listings comes as more homeowners appear to be giving up on waiting for a rate drop. Jamie Derouen, a Redfin Premier agent in Houston, said in Redfin’s own report that “some homeowners have been waiting for mortgage rates to fall and demand to surge — but now they realize” that scenario isn’t arriving soon, which is prompting them to list rather than continue waiting on the sidelines. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.67% for the week ending August 13, and stood at 6.72% on a daily basis by August 19, per Redfin’s tracking — high enough to keep sidelined move-up buyers cautious, but apparently no longer high enough to keep sellers from listing.
Why This Is Good News for Buyers Who’ve Been Waiting
More listings paired with softer pending sales is close to a textbook definition of a market tilting toward buyers. With 20.8% of listings already carrying a price cut and the median asking price actually falling year-over-year for the first time since January, buyers who have been priced out or outbid over the past year are gaining both more homes to choose from and slightly more room to negotiate. Homes are also taking longer to sell, with a median of 43 days on market, and only 26.7% of homes sold above their list price — down from the frenzied bidding-war conditions of recent years, when the sale-to-list ratio ran higher than the current 98.9%.
What It Means Going Into Fall
A 3.8-month supply is still on the tight side of Redfin’s own 4-to-5-month benchmark for a balanced market, so this isn’t a full reversal into buyer-favored territory. But the direction of travel — more inventory, softer demand, falling asking prices, longer days on market — is consistent enough across every metric in the report that buyers who sat out the past two years of bidding wars now have a genuinely stronger case for getting back into the search, particularly in markets where price cuts are already showing up on listings that have lingered past the 43-day median.