Source item

Quoted context

These are the quoted author’s words.

Beneath the Luxury Tier, This Is How Bad Housing Really Is The headline housing numbers are being disproportionately held up by the luxury market. Redfin has explicitly noted that stronger high end price gains are lifting the overall market while ordinary buyers remain constrained by affordability. National median prices were still up 2.2% year over year in August, but beneath that headline the market is increasingly defined by price cuts, seller concessions and collapsing buyer depth. Earlier this summer, luxury prices were rising roughly 3x faster than non luxury prices, and July luxury prices were still up 5.3% nationally. • Nearly 3 in 5 homes are now selling below their original asking price. Buyers are no longer routinely chasing sellers higher. Sellers are increasingly chasing buyers lower. • 21% of sellers are actively cutting their listed price. That is before counting concessions, closing cost assistance, repairs or rate buydowns that can reduce the effective sale price even further. • Sellers now outnumber buyers by 58% nationally, the largest imbalance in Redfin’s records. August had roughly 1.535 million sellers versus only 972,000 buyers. Supply is rising while demand is essentially stagnant. • 36 of the 49 major metros Redfin tracks are now buyer’s markets. In Nashville there are 139% more sellers than buyers, Miami 138%, Houston 131%, Orlando 122%, Las Vegas 117%, San Antonio 116%, Austin 115% and Dallas 108%. • Housing supply is at a 6 year high. Total homes for sale are at their highest level since 2020 while new listings reached their highest level since 2022. The problem is that buyers are not matching that increase in supply. • Mortgage applications fell another 2.7% in the latest MBA survey. Refinance applications dropped 6% in one week and sit 25% below last year, while the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate reached 6.85%, its highest since June 2025. Purchase applications were essentially flat. • The luxury market is masking some of the weakness underneath. Earlier this year luxury prices were rising 4.7% year over year versus only 1.5% for non luxury homes. In July, Miami luxury prices surged 18% while non luxury prices actually fell 1.3%. Tampa luxury prices rose 15.4% while non luxury prices were essentially flat at +0.3%. That is the real housing story. The headline median can keep rising while the marginal transaction underneath it gets weaker. Wealthy cash rich buyers are much less sensitive to a 7% mortgage than ordinary households. Remove that upper end resilience and what remains is a market with record seller competition, historically weak buyer depth, widespread price reductions and increasingly aggressive negotiation.

onechancefreedm ↗