More Home Sellers Lower Asking Price as Market Shifts

For house hunters waiting for the pendulum to swing in the housing market, here’s a bit of welcome news: Sellers are now dropping their price as often as they were before the pandemic. 

As the chart below shows, 19.1% of homes for sale were reduced in price at some point in the past four weeks, the most for any four-week period since October 2019, according to data from real estate company Redfin.

The data shows higher borrowing costs are starting to have an impact on home prices that have soared during the pandemic, hitting record high after record high. Mortgage rates are over 2 percentage points higher than they were a year ago, turning off would-be buyers facing monthly payments that are hundreds of dollars bigger. That in turn leaves more on the market to buy, meaning sellers don’t have quite the same upper hand, and the competition that marked the pandemic era is no longer so fierce.

“The picture of a softening housing market is becoming more clear,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. 

That said, mortgage rates have stopped rising—for now—suggesting housing prices will probably stabilize as well, Fairweather said.

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