If you are getting ready to list a home this fall, or you already have one sitting on the market, the ground under you just shifted in a way worth paying attention to. For the first time in more than three years, the median price of a home that actually sold in the United States went down year over year, not up.
That is the headline from a new Redfin report published October 29, 2026, covering the four weeks ending October 25, 2026. The median U.S. home-sale price came in at $389,601, down 0.1 percent from the same period a year earlier. Redfin, the real estate brokerage now operating as part of Rocket Companies, called it the first annual price decline the metric has recorded in over three years, and noted it is not an isolated blip: the prior week also showed a decline, of 0.2 percent, making it two straight weeks of year-over-year price drops after three straight years of gains.
The reason buyers have the upper hand right now comes down to demand, not a supply flood. Pending home sales, which track homes under contract but not yet closed, fell 1.8 percent from the prior week to the lowest level in Redfin's records, which go back to 2021. That decline was not confined to a soft region. Pending sales fell in every one of the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas Redfin tracks, for the third week in a row. Seattle led the drop at 31.6 percent lower pending sales year over year, followed by Atlanta, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Denver.
Part of what is keeping buyers on the sidelines is the monthly cost of closing. The median mortgage payment for a homebuyer hit $2,786, up 10.7 percent year over year, the second-highest level in Redfin's records, trailing only the previous week. That payment reflects a weekly average mortgage rate of 7.32 percent, down slightly from 7.4 percent the week before but still close to a three-year high. Affordability, not a shortage of homes to choose from, is the binding constraint on how many buyers are willing to make an offer right now.
What the Shift Means If You Are Selling This Fall
Sellers are already reacting to slower demand, just not by cutting prices across the board yet. New listings fell 0.6 percent from the previous week to their lowest level since the start of the year, and are down 4 percent from a year ago. Fewer homeowners are choosing to test the market right now.
Even so, total housing supply nudged up 0.3 percent from the prior week to 1,510,619 active listings on a seasonally adjusted basis, 2.2 percent higher than a year earlier. The reason inventory keeps climbing even as new listings shrink is simple: pending sales are falling faster than new listings are, so homes already on the market are not leaving as quickly as they once did. Months of supply, Redfin's measure of how long it would take to sell every home currently listed at the current sales pace, rose to 4.5 months, up from 4 months in the prior reading. Redfin's own methodology treats four to five months of supply as a balanced market, meaning the country as a whole has not tipped sharply toward a buyer's market, but it has clearly stepped back from the seller-favored conditions of the past few years.
Homes are also sitting longer. The median days on market rose to 50, one day higher than the prior reading, and the share of listings that go under contract within two weeks fell to 27.5 percent, down from 28.5 percent. If you listed six months ago and sold within a week, that pace is no longer the baseline to expect.
Price cuts are becoming more common but are still the exception, not the rule. Redfin found 21.5 percent of active listings carry a price drop right now, up from 20.9 percent the week before. At the same time, 23.2 percent of homes sold above their list price, unchanged from the prior reading, and the average sale-to-list price ratio held steady at 98.3 percent. Put those two numbers together and the picture is less about a broad price collapse and more about a widening gap between homes priced to today's buyer pool and homes still priced for last spring's market. The first group is still closing near asking. The second group is where the price cuts are concentrated.
The National Number Hides a Very Local Story
If you are selling in San Francisco, this report reads nothing like a cooling market. San Francisco posted the largest year-over-year gain in median sale price among the 50 metros Redfin tracks, up 15 percent, with New Brunswick, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland also posting solid annual gains. On the other end of the list, Seattle's median sale price fell 5.1 percent year over year, followed by San Jose, California, Austin, Texas, Kansas City, Missouri, and Nashville, Tennessee.
New listing activity tells a similarly uneven story. San Jose, Newark, New Jersey, and Boston posted double-digit year-over-year increases in new listings, while Atlanta, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Minneapolis all saw new listings drop by double digits over the same period. Two sellers reading the same national headline this week could be looking at opposite realities depending on which of those metros they are in.
That gap is the real takeaway for anyone listing a home in the next few weeks. A national median price falling 0.1 percent year over year does not tell you what your own street looks like, and neither does a national months-of-supply figure of 4.5. The more useful question to bring to your own listing conversation is how pending sales and new listings have moved in your specific metro over the last four weeks, not what Redfin reported for the country as a whole. Pricing a home to the comps that actually closed in your neighborhood this month, rather than the comps from six months ago, is what separates a listing that sells near asking from one that sits long enough to need a price cut of its own.
