The Strongest Buyer's Market on Record — With Prices Still Rising

Sellers outnumbered buyers by 58% in August, the widest gap in Redfin's market-balance data, which reaches back to 2013. That makes this the strongest buyer's market Redfin has recorded since it began tracking in 2013, and it arrived alongside an equally loud reading from the brokerage's other screen: 44.7% of August home sales carried a seller concession, a six-year high for the month.

The census behind the top line is lopsided. Of the 49 metros Redfin classifies, 36 are buyer's markets (sellers outnumbering buyers by more than 10%), and just five remain seller's markets — Nassau County, Newark, Montgomery County PA, Milwaukee, and San Francisco. Nashville is the most tilted of all, with 139% more sellers than buyers; Miami and Houston aren't far behind, and the top ten are all Sun Belt.

Now the part that doesn't fit the headline. If nearly half of buyers are getting sweeteners and most of the country has tipped toward them, you'd expect prices to fall. They haven't. The national median sale price was up 2.2% year over year in August, and it still rose 1.6% even inside the buyer's markets themselves; in the five seller's markets it rose 5.5%.

The reconciliation is a definition. Redfin counts a concession as anything that lowers a buyer's total cost without touching the sale price — money toward closing costs, repairs, or a mortgage-rate buydown. By definition a concession doesn't lower the sale price, though it can accompany an actual price cut rather than replace one. So the record discounting is happening off the price tape: sellers hold nominal prices up and push the effective price down beneath them. How big is the actual discount? Just 15.8% of August sales paired a concession with a real price cut — the most on record for the month, but a minority of the 44.7%.

Strip it down further and "buyers' favor" is really a Sun Belt story. Concessions show up in roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of sales in Atlanta (72.8%), Charlotte, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Raleigh. In San Jose the share is 4.2%; in New York, 5.7%. The coasts barely participate because the glut was built, not borrowed: the strongest buyer's markets sit where post-pandemic builders overbuilt new-supply inventory, while constrained construction in the Northeast and AI-driven wealth in the Bay Area kept those five markets tight.

Two caveats temper the record. The August 44.7% is the highest for the month but not the top of the census — May's 46.2% still holds that badge, so the concessions reading is more plateau than fresh peak. And the buyer's tilt is a supply event, not a demand collapse: sellers rose a record 3.9% month over month while buyers sat flat.

The upshot is a buyer's market whose discount is invisible to price indices — and felt hardest by whoever is holding overbuilt Sun Belt inventory. The national price tape looks fine because the concessions carry the real discount off-screen. Watch the 15.8% double-dip line: if that share keeps climbing, the effective concessions will finally be turning into honest price cuts, and the strongest buyer's market on record would, for the first time, show up in price.