More than three years of steady increases in U.S. home prices ended in October.
The median price that a home sold for last month nationwide fell to $388,634, a 0.4% decrease from what buyers paid in October 2025, according to new data released Tuesday from the online real estate brokerage Redfin.
It’s the first monthly drop in prices since May 2023 and Redfin noted in a post that home sale prices have gone up “nearly every single month for the last 13 years” with the exception of a few months in 2023.
The reversal represents what Redfin called a “sharp slowdown” from a 2.5% increase in home sale prices just two months ago amid higher mortgage rates causing more would-be buyers to pause their home searches.
Pending home sales also hit a significant low in October, down 3.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis. That’s the lowest number of homes under contract across the country since 2013, with the exception of April 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns were underway.
The current reduction in demand, combined with more homes for sale since early 2020, is making it easier for buyers to negotiate better deals and now, “that’s finally showing up in sale prices,” according to the post.
“It’s a buyer’s market, but not many people can afford to buy,” Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics, said in the post. “That could start to shift a bit, now that sale prices are closer to reflecting the shape of the market.”
Zhao suggested house hunters “try offering below the asking price, and negotiating for closing costs, repairs and maybe even mortgage-rate buy downs” and move one if they’re not satisfied with the price.
She said that “with a big pool of inventory sitting on the market, buyers can afford to be picky.”
Of course, not every housing market has suddenly gotten cheaper. Higher prices were measured in half the county’s 50 most populated metropolitan areas of the country analyzed by Redfin, none of which are in Utah.
The biggest hike in home prices was in San Francisco, where what’s been called a “mansion shortage” for wealthy AI sector employees drove up October sale prices by 16.8% year-over-year. Areas in around New York City followed with smaller gains.
Austin and Nashville, among the nation’s strongest buyer’s markets, has some of the largest decreases in home prices. Austin topped that list, falling 6.5% from October 2025, while Nashville was down 4.9%. Seattle, where the tech industry is faltering, fell slightly more, 5.1%.