The typical home listed for sale in the United States carried an asking price of $396,881 in the four weeks ending October 11, according to Redfin. That is 0.3% lower than a year earlier, and Redfin says it is the first yearly decline in asking prices since March. The drop is small, but it arrives while buyers are scarce and sellers are plentiful.
Redfin data journalist Dana Anderson wrote the weekly report, published October 15. The figure is seasonally adjusted and covers the four weeks through October 11, so it is a rolling snapshot of what sellers are asking, not a calendar-month average and not what homes sold for.
Sellers are cutting prices while buyers stay away
Asking prices are the opening bid. The prices homes actually fetched told a slightly different story in the same report: the median sale price was $391,116, up 0.5% from a year earlier. Redfin called that the slowest annual growth since March, so sale prices are still rising, only barely.
More sellers are blinking. Redfin reports that 22% of listings had a price cut, up from 20.9% a year earlier and the highest share in its records. A price cut is the plainest sign that a seller priced the home above what the market would pay.
Anyone who owns a home, or is thinking of selling one, now has a concrete question to answer: does a market that favors buyers change what the house is worth, and does it change what the house costs to keep? The first half has a data answer. The second half depends on a local tax office, not on Redfin.
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Supply is part of the reason. Active listings stood at 1,506,396, up 2% from a year ago, according to Redfin’s October 15 press release. New listings were 359,859, down 1.3%, so the supply of homes for sale is growing even though fewer new sellers are listing than a year ago.
Pending sales, a count of homes under contract, were 286,531 in the same four weeks, down 12.7% from a year earlier. Redfin says they fell year over year in all 50 of the most populous metro areas. Fewer contracts with more listings is how an asking price softens.
A separate Redfin report shows how lopsided the balance has become. In September, there were an estimated 62.6% more sellers than buyers nationwide, up from 56.9% in August, according to Redfin’s buyers-versus-sellers analysis. The same report counts 928,892 buyers and 1,510,784 sellers, and it classifies 41 of the 50 largest metros as buyer’s markets.
A lower sticker price is not a lower payment
The asking-price dip has not helped affordability. Redfin puts the typical homebuyer’s monthly payment at $2,777 at a 7.4% mortgage rate, up 8.8% from a year earlier. The weekly average rate reached a three-year high of 7.4% on October 8, Redfin says, before daily rates eased to 7.45% on October 14.
Freddie Mac’s weekly survey tells the same story. The 30-year fixed rate averaged 7.40% on October 15, unchanged from the prior week, against 6.27% a year earlier, according to Freddie Mac. A 0.3% cheaper house does little against a rate more than a full percentage point higher.
That arithmetic explains the standoff. Sellers who bought or refinanced at lower rates are reluctant to move, and buyers face a payment near its record, so listings pile up while contracts fall.
Where prices are dropping fastest
The national figure hides wide differences. Redfin’s press release lists the biggest year-over-year declines in median sale price for the four weeks ending October 11: Seattle at 6.3%, San Jose at 4.8%, Orlando at 3.4%, Charlotte at 2.3% and Anaheim at 2.1%. Those are the metros where a seller is most likely to see a price below what a neighbor got a year ago.
Federal data covers a longer stretch. The Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development put the median price of houses sold at $410,700 in the second quarter of 2026, compared with $416,100 a year earlier and $408,500 in the first quarter. By that measure, sold prices are about 1.3% lower than a year ago, a different reading from Redfin’s, because the series is not seasonally adjusted and covers a different period.
What a cooling market does not settle
Asking prices measure what sellers hope for. They do not set a homeowner’s property tax bill, which comes from a local assessment and a local rate, and they do not by themselves trigger any relief program. A cooling market can leave a homeowner with a cheaper-looking neighborhood and an unchanged bill.
That gap is where older homeowners on fixed incomes can lose money without noticing. The housing data says prices are softening at the margins, but a tax exemption, freeze or circuit-breaker credit still has to be applied for, and each has its own date.
Does a softer housing market change what a home costs to keep?
Asking prices fell 0.3%, but the monthly payment on a typical purchase rose 8.8%, and a property tax bill follows its own assessment calendar. A homeowner who waits for the market to lower the bill can miss the exemption, freeze or appeal date that actually would.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit turns that gap into a to-do list. It lays out the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and includes an application log and renewal calendar, and it walks through reading a tax bill line by line and appealing an assessment.
Get the property-tax relief kit with the application log and renewal calendar →
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
