New listings for homes are up nationwide even as demand remains down.
There were 6% more homes listed in the U.S. during the four weeks ending Aug. 23 than a year ago on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the latest data from Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.
With a 0.4 percentage point increase from a week earlier, listings hit the highest level since April. At the same time, the total number of homes for sale increased 0.5% week over week, the most since May.
But the high cost of housing, including climbing mortgage rates, continues to keep many would-be buyers from making a move, Redfin said. Pending home sales were down 3.1% from a year earlier and 1.1% from the prior week, dropping to the lowest level in six months.
That makes for what Redfin is calling “a big-time buyer’s market in much of the country” right now.
“Buyers have an opportunity to get a deal done before the market potentially picks back up after Labor Day,” Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, said this week in a post that cited an earlier analysis showing late August or early September can be “prime times” for buyers.
Her advice to house hunters is to “consider homes that have been listed for several weeks; sellers of those homes may be willing to accept an offer under asking price, provide concessions like a mortgage-rate buy down or make repairs based on an inspection.”
Sellers, however, “should resist the urge to price based on what a neighbor got a year or two ago,” Zhao said. “Pricing a home correctly from the start can be the difference between attracting a serious buyer and lingering on the market.”
The biggest year-over-year jump in new listings among the nation’s 50 most populated metropolitan areas were in Virginia Beach, Virginia, up 14.3%; San Jose, California, up 13.3%; Boston, up 9%; and St. Louis and Seattle, both up 8.9%.
Listings fell the most in the past four weeks compared to the same period in 2025 in Dallas, down 12.3%; Atlanta, down 9.4%; San Antonio, down 4.6%; Columbus, Ohio, down 4.2%; and Jacksonville, Florida, down 4.2%. The Redfin analysis did not include any place in Utah.
The Utah Association of Realtors is still collecting data for August, spokeswoman Deanna Devey told the Deseret News, but based on the new listings that have been entered so far, they would be down 4% from the same month last year.
Still, she said, that’s not a fair comparison because there are still a few days left in the month.
“It’s too early to tell if they’re down or if they’re up because we’re not comparing apples to apples until the month is over,” Devey said. For July, she said new listings for Utah were down 2.3% from last year.
“July new listings have stayed in a similar range the past few years,” she said, noting that people often vacation that month, limiting activity. “July’s new listings this year are slightly below 2025 levels and are up 6% from July 2024.”
Realtors described this July as “similar to the July activity they’ve seen” in previous years, Devey said.
The association’s president-elect, Aaron Drussel, told the Deseret News earlier this month that this is “a great time” for buyers because many sellers are feeling pressured to adjust their pricing as students head back to school and house hunting winds down.
“You are seeing sellers become more motivated,” Drussel said of the already slow market. “The fear is moving into the fall and then, before you know it, it’s going to be the holidays and winter. For some sellers, the concern is, ‘Am I going to miss the selling season?’”