If you've been thinking about listing your home this fall, you might still be picturing the market the way it looked back in the spring: a handful of showings booked before you'd even finished staging, offers landing within days of the first open house. That version of the market is fading. A new report from Redfin, released September 9, found that the total number of U.S. homes for sale just climbed to its highest level since 2020, and new listings hit their highest monthly total in more than four years. Sellers who list without adjusting for that shift are likely to be surprised by how their home actually performs.
New listings rose 2.6% from July to August on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to Redfin, the real estate brokerage now part of Rocket Companies. That's roughly a 4.3% increase from a year earlier, and it's the strongest month for fresh listings since 2022. Add those new listings to the homes already sitting on the market, and total inventory grew 3.9% from the month before to its highest point since 2020, a genuinely different environment than the tight, lock-in-driven supply sellers have gotten used to over the past few years.
Part of what's driving the jump is the mortgage rate lock-in effect finally loosening its grip. Homeowners who bought or refinanced at 3% and 4% rates have been reluctant to sell and trade into something with a 6% handle, but life circumstances, job changes, growing families, downsizing, eventually catch up with even the most rate-averse seller. Redfin's data also points to sellers reading the room. In Seattle, where active listings rose faster than anywhere else in the country, local agents say some homeowners are listing now because they expect prices to soften further and would rather sell into today's market than a weaker one next year.
Here's the catch, though, and it's an important one: demand hasn't grown anywhere near as fast as supply has. Pending home sales were essentially flat in August, up just 0.1% from July and down 1.3% from a year earlier. Closed sales, which reflect deals that actually made it to the finish line, slipped 0.4% year over year to their lowest level in more than a year. Buyers are still out there. They're just not moving with much urgency, because for the first time in a while, they don't have to.
That combination, more homes for sale and buyers who feel no rush, shows up directly in how negotiations are playing out. Nearly three in five homes that sold in August, 59.5%, went for less than their original asking price. The average home sold for about 96.4% of its final list price. The typical home under contract took 50 days to get there, unchanged from both July and a year earlier. None of those numbers is dramatic on its own. Together, they describe a market where buyers are comparing several similar homes before writing an offer, and where a seller who prices even a little aggressively is likely to sit.
What This Means If You're Listing This Fall
Price to what's actually selling, not to what your neighbor's house listed for back in April. The comps that mattered in spring, when inventory was tighter and buyers were competing for fewer options, don't reflect today's environment. An agent who pulls sales from the last 30 to 60 days, not the last six months, will give you a number that's more likely to hold up once a buyer's appraisal comes back.
Expect the negotiation to move past price. With almost three in five sellers already coming down from their list price, buyers in a lot of markets are also asking for repair credits, closing cost help or a later closing date. Building a little room into your expectations before you list, rather than discovering it in the middle of a counteroffer, tends to keep the process from feeling like a loss.
Don't assume the national number describes your street. Redfin's own city-level data shows how wide the range is right now. In Seattle, active listings rose 24.2% year over year, the biggest jump of any metro Redfin tracks, while home prices there fell 5.3% year over year. In San Francisco, where AI-driven wealth has kept demand strong, only 30% of homes sold below asking price in August, the smallest share in the country. A seller in a fast-loosening market like Seattle needs a different strategy than a seller in a market that's still tight. It's worth a direct conversation with your agent about which one your neighborhood actually looks like right now, not which one the national headlines describe.
None of this means home values are falling apart. The national median sale price rose 2.2% year over year in August to $398,596, the highest that figure has ever been for the month of August. Rising supply is real, and it's shifting some leverage toward buyers in a lot of places, but it's happening against a backdrop of prices that are still, on average, higher than they were a year ago. As HouseJet sees it, this looks a lot more like a rebalancing than a reversal.
It's worth remembering that a slower market and a bad market aren't the same thing.
If you're planning to list in the next few months, the smart move is getting your pricing strategy right before more of this fall's new listings hit the market and add to the competition you're facing. If your home is already listed and traffic has been thin, it might have less to do with the overall market and more to do with where your price sits relative to what's actually closing nearby, worth raising directly with your agent. And if you're weighing whether to wait until spring instead, keep in mind that spring typically brings its own wave of new listings too, so waiting doesn't necessarily mean waiting for less competition.
It's also the kind of shift worth tracking on a resource like HouseJet, even before you're ready to list, since supply and demand can look different again by the time your home actually goes on the market.
Selling in a market with more choices for buyers takes different prep than selling in a market with a shortage of them. Get the pricing right for right now. Everything else about this fall's market gets a lot easier once you do.
