The U.S. housing market has quietly become the friendliest to buyers in more than ten years. The catch? The buyers have apparently taken a collective coffee break and forgotten to come back.
Mortgage rates are teasing their lowest levels of 2025, inventory is piling up like unsold fruitcake after Christmas, and sellers now outnumber buyers by a comical 37 percent, according to Redfin. Translation: it’s officially a buyer’s market for the first time since the era of flip phones and low-rise jeans.
Home prices are finally growing slower than a teenager’s attention span. Sellers are offering closing-cost help, rate buydowns, and probably free refrigerators if you promise not to laugh at their 2021 asking price.
Yet sales remain stuck near thirty-year lows because the people who could actually take advantage of this buyer bonanza are too busy refreshing their rent-vs-buy calculators and crying softly into their avocado toast.
Zillow now counts nineteen major metros where buyers hold the upper hand, more than double the number from last year. Southern favorites such as Houston, San Antonio, Nashville, and Jacksonville have been buyer-friendly for a while, thanks to builders who constructed houses like they were printing money.
New entrants to the buyer’s club include Cincinnati and Milwaukee—cities previously known for beer and… well, more beer—suddenly offering six-plus months of inventory. Six months of supply is the official real-estate definition of “please love us.”
In Boise, still technically a seller’s market, agents report buyers doing complex math on napkins and deciding the numbers only work in an alternate universe where wages grow as fast as asking prices.
Sellers, once proud warriors who rejected offers with free cars attached, now dangle concessions the way desperate uncles dangle candy at family reunions.
Active listings fell half a percent from September to October. Active buyers fell a much more dramatic 1.7 percent, hitting the lowest level since the dark days of April 2020 when the only thing moving was toilet-paper resale value.
One brave 27-year-old in Austin did manage to buy this year, snagging a home for $320,000 after years of saving and deploying a first-time buyer credit like a financial cheat code. Austin’s median price has actually dropped from its peak, yet remains fifty percent higher than 2019—proving that “cooling” is relative when you started at lava temperatures.
She loves her new home and no longer has to play the annual game of “musical leases.” Still, her advice to peers boils down to: maybe don’t do what I just did unless you really, really hate having emergency savings.
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