Price cuts creep back up as summer selling season stalls

After a strong spring and promising early summer, July saw homebuying stagnate as a result of rising borrowing costs, forcing sellers to slash prices to revive demand.The share of listings with a price cut reached 20% in July, nearly even with last year’s levels, after running close to 2 percentage points lower throughout spring, according to the latest Realtor.com housing market trends report released on Monday.For the first six months of the year, the dominant theme of the national housing market was sellers pricing realistically from the outset to meet buyers where they are to avoid listings going stale.By the end of June, the share of for-sale homes across the U.S.with price cuts was 1.9 percentage points lower than the prior year.However, as summer entered its peak, price cuts picked up as vacationing would-be buyers pulled back and aging listings piled up on the market.“We are seeing the housing market run up against some headwinds, especially on the mortgage rate front, at the exact time when buyer demand starts to dip seasonally,” says Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel.

“So while the realistic pricing narrative is still there, the story has weakened a bit recently.”On a month-over-month basis, the share of listings with price reductions rose from 18.8% to 20%.“July might be hinting at even softer demand than sellers are anticipating,” notes Krimmel.“This will be something to watch as the summer progresses.” At the regional level, price cuts were least common in the Northeast (13.7% of listings) and Midwest (18.7%), where inventory is tight and demand is robust.

By contrast, buyers had better luck finding discounted properties in the more well-supplied West (21.9%) and South (21.3%).Yet, housing data analysis points to early signs of market softening in the Northeast and Midwest, where the share of price-reduced listings ticked up by 1 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively, compared to July 2025.A zoomed-in look at metr...