By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-16 17:46:18 | Updated at 2026-10-16 18:30:29
48 minutes ago
Around 22 percent of home sellers with active listings have slashed their asking prices, giving potential buyers more negotiating power in deals, according to a recent update from real estate brokerage Redfin.
Redfin registered a record high in price drops for the four weeks ending Oct. 11, with median home-sale price growing at the slowest growth rate since March this year. Meanwhile, homebuying demand remains near the record low, the brokerage said.
“For house hunters who have the budget and job security to purchase a home in today’s market, that creates a unique opportunity: They can be picky, negotiate, and even walk away if the deal doesn’t make sense financially or they find something they like better,” Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin, said in an Oct. 14 company report.
Sellers are dropping prices as the market turns more favorable toward buyers. In September, there were an estimated 62.6 percent more sellers than buyers in the U.S. housing market, the largest gap since 2013, Redfin said.
However, despite the market tilting in their favor, this is only a buyer’s market for those who can afford to purchase homes, the brokerage clarified.
Many buyers are standing on the sidelines because of elevated home prices and high mortgage rates.
The median sale price of Redfin-listed homes was $391,116 for the four weeks ending Oct. 11, up 0.5 percent from a year back, and the median monthly mortgage payment was $2,777, up 8.8 percent year over year.
The latest mortgage payment number is the highest level in Redfin’s records except for the previous week, the company said.
The weekly average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 7.4 percent for the week ending Oct. 14, the highest level in nearly three years, according to Freddie Mac data.
US Housing Market
In September, an estimated 319,346 existing homes were sold, down 2.5 percent from September 2025, according to a Zillow market report. Meanwhile, the active inventory of properties for sale was 2.5 percent higher year over year.
The typical fall slowdown, combined with high mortgage rates, chilled housing activity last month, Zillow said, adding that the affordability situation has worsened.
“A household earning the median income would need to spend 34.3 percent of its income on the typical monthly mortgage payment,” the report said. “That is up from 33.7 percent a year earlier.”
On the construction front, builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes declined in September from the previous month, according to a Sept. 16 statement from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).
“Buyer traffic has weakened across much of the country, largely because of rising mortgage rates,” NAHB Chairman Bill Owens said in the statement. “Builders also continue to face higher material costs, rising gas and diesel prices, and persistent labor shortages.”
NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz said that builder confidence was at its lowest level since September last year.
The Trump administration has taken certain actions to address housing affordability.
For instance, last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
announcedit had issued a memorandum repealing a 2013 housing design guidance that had raised the costs of building, buying, and renting multifamily dwellings.
Earlier, in a May 4 statement, HUD
saidit was updating certain environmental review requirements to help reduce costs for multifamily property lenders and developers. The updates related to construction considerations such as railroad vibration assessments and standards for high-voltage power lines.
The changes are about “fixing policies that have made housing expensive and difficult to build,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in the statement.
