For most of this year, the story on pending home sales has been the same one, told over and over: buyers signing fewer contracts, month after month, as mortgage rates climbed back toward levels nobody expected to see again. So here's a stat that might surprise you. In August, the number of buyers who actually got under contract went up, not down, for the first time in three months.
The National Association of Realtors' Pending Home Sales Index rose 0.3% in August, to 71.2, according to a report NAR published on September 17. That follows a 2.3% drop in July and a 5.4% drop in June. It's a small increase in the scheme of things, and the index is still down 4.7% from a year earlier. But after a spring and summer of almost nothing but declines, a month where more contracts got signed than the month before is genuinely worth pausing on.
Here's the part that trips people up, though: around the same time NAR put out that number, Redfin published its own weekly tracker showing pending sales at their lowest level in nearly three years, down roughly 5% from a year ago. So which one is right? Both of them, actually, just measured differently. NAR's index tracks contracts signed during a full calendar month, reported with a lag. Redfin's tracker is a rolling four-week weekly snapshot that reacts faster but bounces around more. Neither is wrong. HouseJet believes the more useful habit is checking which timeframe a given headline is actually describing before deciding what it means for your listing, rather than treating any single weekly print as the whole story.
It's worth understanding what actually moved in August. Mortgage rates were part of the story, and not in the direction sellers would want. Freddie Mac's weekly survey has rates climbing through the month, eventually crossing 7% for the first time since January 2025. That alone would normally be enough to push contract activity lower, not higher. So the fact that signings ticked up anyway suggests something else was happening underneath the rate headline: buyers who can still afford today's payment, and who have been waiting on the sidelines, deciding that waiting any longer wasn't buying them much.
The regional breakdown backs that up, and it's not evenly spread. The South posted a 2.3% monthly gain and the West rose 3.0%, even though both regions are still down sharply from a year ago. The Midwest slipped 1.6% and the Northeast fell 4.2% over the same month. None of this means homes are suddenly easy to sell. It means the national number is an average of markets moving in genuinely different directions, and the metro-level trend where your home actually sits matters more than whatever headline you saw this morning.
So Does This Mean the Market Is Turning Back in Sellers' Favor?
Not exactly, and it's worth being honest about that rather than getting ahead of one data point. Existing-home sales for August, reported separately by NAR, actually fell 2.0% from July and sit 1.2% below where they were a year ago, with 4.9 months of supply on the market, the most in over a decade. Roughly one in five active listings is carrying a price cut right now, a share that's crept up rather than down. HouseJet has been tracking that inventory build for weeks, and one month of firmer contract signings doesn't erase it.
Here's the catch, though, and it's an important one: more supply and softer year-over-year comparisons are exactly the environment where pricing discipline actually pays off. A home priced to what's closed in your neighborhood in the last thirty days, not to what a similar house sold for back in the spring, is the one still attracting the buyers who are out there right now. A home priced to hope is the one sitting, collecting a price cut, and eventually selling for less than it would have if it had been priced correctly from day one.
So what should that mean for how you approach your own listing? Start with the comps, not the headline. The most useful thing you can do right now is get current on your own comps, not the national ones. Ask your agent to pull everything that's closed in your specific area over the last two to four weeks, not the last quarter, since a market with 4.9 months of supply can shift meaningfully in that window. That's the number that should set your list price, not the figure a national headline led with.
The second thing worth doing is deciding, honestly, what your timeline actually allows. If you need to sell in the next few months regardless of what the market does, price aggressively and correctly from the start, because the data above suggests buyers are still transacting, just more selectively than they were a year or two ago. If you have real flexibility, that's worth factoring into how you weigh a lowball offer against simply waiting for the right buyer.
The third is a conversation that's easy to skip and shouldn't be: talk to a lender before you talk to buyers about financing concessions. Rate buydowns and closing-cost credits have become a normal part of negotiations in a market like this one, and a licensed mortgage professional can tell you, in specific numbers, what a given concession actually costs you versus what it's worth to a buyer sitting at today's rates. That's a conversation worth having early, not after an offer is already on the table.
If you're a buyer reading this instead, the same data cuts a different way. Inventory is near a decade high, sellers are cutting prices at an elevated rate, and the buyers who signed contracts in August did it despite rates above 7%, which tells you there's still real room to negotiate on price and terms if you're ready to move. If you're a homeowner who isn't buying or selling right now, none of this requires action from you today, but it's a page worth bookmarking, since the gap between the national headline and your specific street is often wider than either report lets on, and HouseJet updates its read on that gap as new data comes in.
One month of firmer contract activity is a data point, not a trend. It's worth knowing about because it complicates the simpler, gloomier story that's been easy to tell all year. But it doesn't change the fundamentals sellers are actually working with: more competition, more price-sensitive buyers, and a market that rewards precision over optimism. Price to what's actually closing, not to what you wish the market still believed. That's what's working in August. It's still what's likely to work in September.