Every week, there's a new headline about “the housing market.” Prices are up. Prices are down. The market's cooling. The market's heating back up. And every week, somewhere, someone reads one of those headlines and makes a decision based on it — holds off on listing, panics about an offer, assumes they're getting a deal or missing one. Here's the thing, though: “the housing market” doesn't really exist.
Not as one thing, anyway, according to HouseJet.
What actually exists is thousands of local markets, each behaving according to its own supply, its own demand, and its own conditions — and right now, some of those markets couldn't look more different from each other if they tried.
Take Phoenix and Austin. Both boomed hard during the pandemic years, with people moving in from all over and prices climbing fast. Both are now sitting in a very different spot. In Phoenix, more than half of all active listings have had a price cut. Inventory has built up to a little over four months' worth — enough that it's considered a balanced-to-buyer's market. And in the $200,000 to $600,000 range, more than half of all deals now include some kind of concession: closing cost help, a rate buydown, something. Builders, too, are leaning hard into incentives to keep buyers moving.
Austin tells a similar story, maybe even more so. Roughly 52% of active listings there have taken a price drop. Inventory is running close to three months. And sellers are offering concessions at levels that, by some measures, haven't been seen since 2014. If you're a buyer in either of these cities right now, you're walking into a market that wants to negotiate with you.
Now picture a totally different metro — one that didn't see quite the same pandemic-era runup, where inventory never really built up and demand has stayed steady. In markets like that, price cuts are happening on roughly a quarter to a third of listings — noticeably less than Phoenix or Austin — and pending sales have actually been growing faster, sometimes close to double the pace of the markets that boomed and are now cooling. Same week, same national headline applying to all of it equally — and yet a buyer in one of these markets is having a completely different experience than a buyer in Phoenix.
And here's the part that trips people up even more: this split doesn't stop at the city line. It happens block by block.
Within a single metro, you can have one neighborhood where homes are sitting for two months with price cuts piling up, and another neighborhood fifteen minutes away — maybe it's got a better school zone, or it's closer to a new employer, or it just has less new construction competing with resales — where homes are still going under contract in a couple of weeks with barely any negotiating room. Same metro area, same week, same news cycle. Two completely different markets.
So why does any of this matter for your move?
Because if you're making a decision based on a national headline — “prices are falling, I should wait” or “the market's still hot, I need to act now” — you might be reacting to a story that has nothing to do with the street you actually live on or the neighborhood you're trying to buy into. A seller in a tight, low-inventory neighborhood who holds off because they read that “prices are dropping nationally” might be leaving money on the table in a market where their specific type of home is still getting multiple offers. A buyer in a soft market who rushes to make a strong offer because they're worried about “missing the window” might be giving up negotiating leverage they didn't realize they had.
The national number isn't useless — it's a real measurement of something. It's just not a measurement of your situation.
So instead, here's what's actually worth looking at for your specific area — and none of it requires a finance background to understand.
Local inventory, usually measured in “months of supply” — basically, at the current pace of sales, how long would it take to sell everything currently on the market? A number under about three months tends to favor sellers. Closer to five or six starts to favor buyers. Days on market — how long are homes in your specific area and price range actually sitting before they go under contract? A week or two tells a very different story than two or three months. Price-cut frequency — what percentage of active listings near you have already dropped their price at least once? If it's a large share, that's a market telling you something about where pricing actually needs to land. And absorption rate — how quickly is new inventory getting soaked up by buyers? This is related to months of supply, but it's worth watching as a trend over a few months, not just a single snapshot.
Something worthy of noting here is this fact: a real estate agent who can't provide you with this level of data and statistics and relate it to how you should position your home for sale from a pricing standpoint is not the agent you should select. Choose to only work with an agent who know the numbers for your market at a high level and who can translate what those numbers mean into real dollars and cents for you.
None of these numbers are secret. They're available for pretty much any area if you know where to look, and they'll tell you far more about your actual situation than any national headline ever could.
We asked Mike Oddo, CEO of HouseJet, why this distinction matters so much to him. “The national average is a story for the news,” he said. “It's a real number, it's not made up, but it's an average of thousands of completely different markets, and almost nobody actually lives in the average. Your zip code is the only number that actually pays your bills — it's what determines what your home is worth, how fast it'll sell, and what kind of negotiating position you're in. If you only pay attention to one number before making a decision this big, make it that one, not the one on the news.”
So before you let a national headline talk you into waiting, rushing, panicking, or celebrating — take a breath and zoom in. Look at what's actually happening with homes like yours, in your area, right now. Days on market, price cuts, inventory — that's the real picture. The national story might make for an interesting read, but it's your local one that's actually going to show up in your offer, your closing, and your next move.
