Homebuyers continue to gain leverage in a housing market that has been tilted against them for multiple years, but the shift is showing up in a far more complicated way than a nationwide collapse in home prices would.
According to a recent Redfin report, 21.1% of active U.S. listings had a price cut during the four weeks ending Sept. 20, the highest September share in its records. At the same time, bidding wars have faded, homes are lingering longer, and Redfin describes the current market as the strongest buyer’s market on record.
For buyers, that could mean more room to negotiate on price, closing costs, repairs, or mortgage-rate buydowns. Redfin says nearly 50% of homebuyers are already receiving some form of seller concession.
However, that national headline masks an important wrinkle.
Price cuts have risen only modestly from 19.8% a year earlier. Instead of consistently cutting prices, many homeowners appear to be pricing more realistically from the start, delaying listings or pulling homes that fail to attract acceptable offers.
That means buyers have more power, but sellers have not capitulated. The market is rebalancing through negotiation, patience, and selective pricing instead of a broad price crash.
Buyers have more leverage, but sellers are changing strategy, too
The most critical part of that change is that buyers now have enough alternatives to compel sellers to make concessions earlier in the process.
Redfin’s data show the share of listings with a price drop increased from 19.8% last year to 21.1% this September.
More Housing market:
- Zillow predicts major mortgage rate, housing market change
- Zillow warns 2026 housing market has officially peaked
- Americans face 3 major takeaways after mortgage rate news
That is a record for the month, but the increase is surprisingly small given how buyer-friendly the market has become. Later in the report, Redfin’s chart shows the price-cut rate moving from 18.8% in 2022 to 17.9% in 2023, 19.0% in 2024, 19.8% in 2025, and 21.1% this year.
That’s an interesting point to consider because a buyer’s market is typically expected to produce much larger markdowns.
Instead, Redfin says some owners continue to keep homes off the market, delist when bids fall short, or price closer to current conditions from day one.
To me, that is the more critical signal. Sellers are adjusting their behavior before a listing becomes distressed.
Redfin Senior Economist Asad Khan said sellers who move homes quickly are “getting savvier about pricing right from day one,” while those that are reliant on outdated comparable sales or hoping for bidding wars risk seeing listings go stale.
For buyers, the implications are obvious. Negotiating power is real, but the best opportunities may increasingly come from stale listings, concessions, and seller-paid financing rather than dramatic headline price collapses.
The housing market is splitting sharply by city
The national average is also hiding an unusually wide geographic divide.
In Denver, 30.9% of sellers cut their asking price, the highest share among the 50 major metros Redfin analyzed. Indianapolis followed at 29.9%, while San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin all exceeded 26%.
Those Texas markets are among the strongest buyer’s markets in the country, with more than twice as many sellers as buyers.
Sellers in those markets are competing directly for a smaller pool of buyers, giving house hunters more leverage on price and terms.
At the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco had the lowest price-cut rate at just 9.6%. Redfin attributes that strength in part to AI-driven wealth, saying buyers there are competing for homes instead of sellers competing for buyers. Newark, Chicago, New York, and Miami also had relatively low shares of price reductions.
What stands out to me is how little sense it now makes to describe the United States as having one housing market.
The same national forces, mortgage rates above 7%, weak affordability, and cautious demand, are producing very different outcomes depending on local supply, employment, and wealth creation.
For buyers, it means national statistics are becoming less useful without metro-level context. A buyer in Austin may have negotiating power that simply does not exist in San Francisco.
That split might widen further if technology-driven wealth continues supporting a handful of expensive markets while inventory builds elsewhere.
The real homebuying reset is happening in expectations, not just prices
The deeper shift in Redfin’s report is psychological.
For years, many homeowners could effectively anchor their expectations to the extraordinary housing market of 2021, as reported by The Washington Post, when low mortgage rates and fierce competition made aggressive asking prices easier to defend.
Redfin says that approach is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Mortgage rates remain above 7%, buyers have more options, and homes that are priced too aggressively can sit long enough to lose momentum. As a consequence, Redfin’s guidance to sellers is unusually direct, which means pricing correctly from the beginning might now matter more than leaving room to negotiate later.
That shift gives buyers another source of leverage.
Redfin says homes sitting on the market for more than a month may justify offers below asking, while nearly half of buyers are already receiving concessions such as money toward repairs, closing costs, or mortgage-rate buydowns.
The key takeaway is that a buyer’s market does not necessarily require a national plunge in home prices.
It can emerge through longer selling times, weaker bidding wars, more concessions, and sellers accepting realistic prices earlier.
That is why I would view the 21.1% price-cut rate as only part of the story. The bigger change is that sellers can no longer assume buyers will meet them wherever they set the price.
For households trying to buy, that is meaningful progress. For sellers, it is a warning that the market has moved on from the conditions that defined the pandemic-era housing boom.
Related: Bank of America resets Micron stock forecast as AI ‘memory tax’ rises