MW Home sellers face an 'absolutely brutal' market that's tilting in buyers' favor

By Aarthi Swaminathan

There are 500,000 more home sellers across the U.S. than buyers, Redfin says in a new report

Ryan Sparks has been trying to sell his mom's house in Jupiter, Fla., for the past six months.

Sparks was in college when his parents purchased the home in 1997. But his father, a general contractor, passed away recently and his mother moved into assisted living. The home was paid off, but taxes and utility bills, on top of the homeowners-association fees, were adding up to more than $2,000 a month. Since his mom was not going to move back into the house, he thought he would sell it.

He didn't expect the market to be this barren. Since he listed the five-bedroom home in November, the lack of interest has prompted him to lower the asking price by $241,000 so far. The home is currently listed at $1.15 million; so far, it has only received one lowball offer of $800,000 that was predicated on a contingency that the buyer be able to sell their current home.

"It was just a ridiculous offer," Sparks, who works in the healthcare industry, told MarketWatch. He is now deciding whether to sell now and potentially regret it if prices go up in the near future, or sell now and take what he can get before prices go down further.

But he doesn't want to cut the price any more. "We're reaching the bottom to where we're thinking we can go," Sparks said. "Alternatively, we would see if it is worth trying to just rent the house for a year, and then try to sell again a year from now, seeing if the market might be better." Despite the dire market, he's optimistic about the house's prospects due to its location, which backs up to a preserve and a waterway.

Elsewhere in the South, Anna and Austin Braksick have also been having a hard time selling his home in Charlotte, N.C. Since they first listed the property in mid-April, they have cut the asking price by $50,000.

The Braksicks have offered a rate buydown to buyers to sweeten the deal, agreeing to pay cash upfront to reduce their mortgage rate, but "we're just not seeing the traffic down here" in Charlotte, Austin Braksick said. "Even four, five months ago, the house would have gone in a weekend. It was that hot ... but it's slowed down big time," he added. "It's absolutely brutal right now."

The couple bought the home during the pandemic and have recently been preparing to move to Cincinnati. He had come to Charlotte for a job, but with three kids and the ability to work remotely, he wanted to be closer to family in the Midwest. "I felt like the timing made sense," Braksick, who works in the management-consulting industry, told MarketWatch.

Unlike his experience as a home seller in Charlotte, he faced stiff competition as a buyer in Cincinnati. He has closed on a five-bedroom home in Cincinnati and plans to move in early June, but had to act very quickly and forgo inspections to be competitive. Homes in that area were going way over the asking price, he said.

The two sellers' experiences underscore growing evidence that housing-market dynamics between buyers and sellers have flipped over the past few weeks.

In many local U.S. housing markets, there are far more sellers than buyers. There were nearly 500,000 more sellers than buyers in April, according to a new report by the real-estate brokerage Redfin $(RDFN)$, the highest figure ever since the company began tracking it in 2013. Redfin looked at the number of active listings and compared it with the number of buyers, based on an estimate of how many buyers toured homes and then went on to purchase them.

"In other words, it's a buyer's market," the company said. About 1.9 million homeowners were selling their properties in April, the highest number since March 2020.

The strongest buyer's markets were in Miami, where there were nearly 22,000 sellers and 7,300 buyers, followed by West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, all cities in Florida.

Many sellers have yet to see 'the writing on the wall'

To be sure, many markets still remain a hot sellers' market. Among the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the U.S., the top seller's markets included Newark, N.J., Nassau County, N.Y., and Montgomery County, Pa. In Newark, there were nearly 10,000 buyers and only about 5,200 sellers in April, while home prices were up 12.2% from the same month a year earlier.

But across the country overall, sellers are losing their upper hand in the housing market - even if they haven't realized it. "The balance of power in the U.S. housing market has shifted toward buyers, but a lot of sellers have yet to see or accept the writing on the wall," said Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin.

Listed homes are spending more time on the market than they have in years. About 44% of home listings in April had been on the market for 60 days or longer, the highest share for that month in five years, Redfin said.

"Stale inventory is piling up in part because many sellers are overpricing their homes, using sky-high comps from the recent seller's market that aren't realistic today," Redfin said. "In some cases, sellers are pricing high because they bought at the peak of the market and are trying to recoup their investment."

'Many sellers are overpricing their homes, using sky-high comps from the recent seller's market that aren't realistic today.'Redfin, a real-estate brokerage

As a result, price cuts have become more common this spring. About one in five home listings had their prices reduced in April, the highest share for that month in nine years, according to separate data from Realtor.com. The metro areas with the most listings that had a price cut were Phoenix, Ariz.; Tampa, Fla.; and Jacksonville, Fla.

(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc.; MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)

Advice for struggling sellers: 'Give it some time'

By slashing prices, homeowners are actually traveling down a well-trodden path. Builders have been cutting home prices or dangling perks, such as offering to pay for closing costs or provide money upfront to lower a buyer's mortgage rate, for the past few years. In May, a third of builders cut home prices and 61% offered sales incentives, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders, an industry lobbying group.

One strategy for homeowners struggling to sell their homes is to simply hold off, one real-estate agent advised. Instead of repeatedly cutting prices in an attempt to make their home more appealing to buyers, sellers should consider turning the property into a rental instead.

"My suggestion is, give it some time," Lee Linhart, a Hendersonville, N.C.-based broker and the owner of Re/Max Rising, told MarketWatch. Linhart oversees offices across North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as in Tennessee.

"Rent your house out if you can, and let the market readjust to get back to where you paid for it, whether that's a year or two," he added.

-Aarthi Swaminathan

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May 29, 2025 08:00 ET (12:00 GMT)

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