There were 62.6% more home sellers than buyers in the United States in September, up from 56.9% in August, Redfin reports. The company counts 1,510,784 sellers, the most since March 2020, against 928,892 buyers, the fewest in its records going back to 2013. It is the fourth straight month of record readings.
The numbers come from Redfin’s monthly buyers-versus-sellers analysis, published October 14 by Dana Anderson and Asad Khan. Khan, a Redfin senior economist, described the result as “a buyer’s market born out of caution, not strength.”
How Redfin counts a buyer and a seller
The gap is an estimate, not a head count. Redfin treats sellers as active listings on the multiple listing services that agents use. Buyers are modeled from the typical time between a buyer’s first home tour and closing, combined with listing and pending-sale data.
A market counts as a buyer’s market when sellers exceed buyers by more than 10%, and as a seller’s market when they fall short by more than 10%. Anything within 10% either way is balanced. The estimates are seasonally adjusted and can be revised later.
By that yardstick the country is deep in buyer’s territory. Buyers fell 2.4% from August, the fifth straight monthly decline, while sellers rose 1.2%. Anyone deciding whether to sell, hold or move now has to weigh a market where homes outnumber the people shopping for them by about eight to five.
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Forty-one of the 50 biggest metros favor buyers
Redfin classifies 41 of the 50 most populous metro areas as buyer’s markets, the most in its records. Miami leads at 158.9% more sellers than buyers, up from 134.5% a month earlier. Nashville follows at 152.3%, then Houston at 134.6%, Austin at 130.9% and Tampa at 103.7%.
The raw counts show how thin the buyer side has become. Miami had an estimated 7,304 buyers and 18,909 sellers in September. Houston had 20,230 buyers and 47,456 sellers. The ratio between the two, not the size of the metro, decides the label.
The Sun Belt dominates the top of the list, but the pressure reaches elsewhere. Warren, Michigan, reached 47.1% from 27.3% in August, and Detroit sits at 37.9%, down from 46.5%. St. Louis is at 24.5%, down from 26.9%.
Only five metros still lean toward sellers: Nassau County, New York, where buyers outnumber sellers by 28.6%, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (22.7%), Newark (18.5%), Milwaukee (16.1%) and San Francisco (10.6%). Four others are balanced: Boston, Chicago, Providence and New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Why sellers have the upper hand on paper but not in practice
A long list of listings does not mean a wave of sales. Redfin’s weekly update, published October 15, put pending sales at 286,531 in the four weeks ending October 11, down 12.7% from a year earlier. They fell in all 50 of the largest metros.
Supply is rising even as fewer owners list. Active listings reached 1,506,396, up 2% from a year ago, while new listings slipped 1.3% to 359,859, according to Redfin’s press release. The surplus is building because homes are not closing quickly enough to clear it.
Sellers are answering with discounts. Redfin says 22% of listings had a price cut, up from 20.9% a year earlier and the highest share in its records, and the median asking price slipped 0.3% from a year ago. Sale prices still edged up 0.5% to $391,116, so the concessions are showing up in listings faster than in closings.
Redfin also puts the market at 4.2 months of supply, up from 3.8, and it describes four to five months as a balanced market. Supply is therefore not extreme by that measure, which is why the buyer shortage, rather than a flood of listings, drives the record gap.
Borrowing costs are the likeliest brake. Freddie Mac says the 30-year fixed rate averaged 7.40% on October 15, compared with 6.27% a year earlier. Redfin puts the typical buyer’s monthly payment at $2,777, up 8.8% from a year ago.
New homes are piling up as well
The glut is not limited to existing homes. Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development figures show 8.5 months of supply of new houses in August, down from 9.0 in July. Redfin describes four to five months of supply as a balanced market, though that benchmark applies to its own listing data, so the two measures are not directly comparable.
For homeowners the practical point is that a buyer’s market changes the negotiation, not the bills. A seller may have to cut a price or offer a credit, and a buyer may have time to inspect, bargain and walk away. A homeowner who is not selling sees none of that benefit.
The costs of keeping a house, including the property tax bill, run on a separate track from Redfin’s buyer and seller counts. Those costs are the part of the housing budget that stays fixed while listings pile up.
Staying put while the market tilts toward buyers?
A homeowner who is not selling gets no relief from a market with 62.6% more sellers than buyers. The property tax bill still arrives, and an exemption, freeze or credit that goes unclaimed for a year is money that stays gone.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit sorts the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and explains the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters. It also supplies an application log and renewal calendar, with a section on reading the tax bill line by line.
See the property-tax relief checklist and renewal calendar for homeowners staying put →
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
