Salt Lake City had the largest share of discounted listings among the 50 biggest U.S. metro areas in September, with 33.6 percent of active homes carrying a price cut, Realtor.com reported. Denver followed at 32.1 percent and Portland, Oregon, at 31.6 percent. The national share was 20.8 percent, so a home listed in any of the three western metros was roughly one and a half times as likely to have been marked down as the typical home in the country. The pattern points to how unevenly higher mortgage rates are reaching sellers.
For a homeowner deciding whether to list this fall, the share of listings with a price cut is the nearest published gauge of how often sellers in a market have had to come down from their first asking price. About one listing in three had been marked down in Salt Lake City in September. In New York, the share was about one in ten. Sellers in Buffalo and Hartford, where no more than 12.9 percent of listings were cut, were working in a very different market from sellers in Denver or Portland.
Freddie Mac posts a new 30-year mortgage rate every Thursday, and its October 8 reading was 7.40 percent, against 6.30 percent a year earlier.
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Salt Lake City’s jump in cut listings
Salt Lake City-Murray recorded the biggest year-over-year increase of any metro in Realtor.com’s September housing report. Its price-reduced share rose 6.9 percentage points from a year earlier, while Denver and Portland each gained 1.3 points. Active listings in Salt Lake City were up 14.1 percent from a year earlier, and the median list price was $564,950, down 3.6 percent. Homes there sat a day longer on the market than in September 2025, a small change next to the jump in discounting.
Portland’s figure covers the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro area, which spans Oregon and Washington. Its median list price was $587,750, down 1.9 percent from a year earlier, and active listings rose 6.9 percent. Denver’s median list price fell 4.9 percent to $569,900, a steeper drop than in either Salt Lake City or Portland. In all three metros the median asking price sits between about $565,000 and $588,000, well above the $419,250 national median.
Where sellers are holding their prices
New York had the lowest share of cut listings among the 50 metros at 10.3 percent, followed by Hartford at 12.6 percent and Buffalo at 12.9 percent. Buffalo’s low figure came with a 28.0 percent jump in active listings from a year earlier, one of the largest supply increases in the table, so more homes for sale did not automatically bring more markdowns. San Francisco at 13.4 percent and Miami at 14.9 percent, where active listings fell 10.9 percent and 12.3 percent, were also among the lowest.
The high end of the table was not entirely western. Indianapolis recorded 30.5 percent, Phoenix 29.0 percent and Columbus 28.8 percent, so the discounting reaches into the Midwest and the Mountain West as well. Thirty-six of the 50 metros had a higher share of cut listings than in September 2025, and the national share rose 0.9 percentage points to 20.8 percent. Boston, San Antonio and Virginia Beach each saw their shares fall by 1.9 points, the largest declines in the table.
Mortgage rates, not a rush of sellers
Realtor.com’s chief economist, Danielle Hale, said in the release that buyers are gaining leverage, but that higher mortgage rates are limiting how much of that opportunity they can use. Senior economist Jake Krimmel said more owners are acknowledging that today’s buyers need a lower price. Homes under contract fell 4.1 percent from a year earlier, the second straight monthly decline, and about 5.6 percent of listings were delisted in September, in line with a year earlier.
Borrowing costs have moved the other way from prices. Freddie Mac’s October 8 survey put the average 30-year fixed rate at 7.40 percent, up from 6.30 percent a year earlier, and the 15-year rate at 6.73 percent. Realtor.com’s release ties the markdowns to those rates, saying they are pushing more sellers to reduce prices while cooling demand, and it names no other cause. The national median listing spent 61 days on the market, one more than in August and one fewer than a year earlier.
Comparing price-cut readings before listing a home
Sellers can set Realtor.com’s metro table beside Zillow’s September market report, which put the share of listings with a price cut nationally at 27.4 percent, up from 26.2 percent a year earlier. Realtor.com’s national figure for the same month was 20.8 percent. The two companies report different numbers for the same month, so each reading is best tracked against its own earlier months, and the direction of a rise says more than the level.
Time on market belongs beside the cut share. Median days on market moved by a single day in each direction in the two metros, up one in Salt Lake City and down one in Portland, even as about a third of listings in each carried a price cut. A seller reading the cut share alone would miss that the typical listing in both metros is selling on about the same schedule as a year ago.
Realtor.com says the gap between today’s inventory and typical pre-pandemic levels has narrowed to 9.1 percent, and Krimmel says local supply, affordability and rate sensitivity are increasingly determining how quickly each market adjusts. In Salt Lake City, where active listings are up 14.1 percent and a third of homes are marked down, that adjustment is already in the numbers. Whether Denver and Portland follow Salt Lake City’s 6.9-point climb is the figure Realtor.com’s October report will show.
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This article was prepared with AI assistance from cited public sources and reviewed before publication.
