Realtor.com
With less than three weeks until summer’s end, the housing market has effectively come to a standstill because of an ongoing buyer-seller impasse—and an increasing number of homes are left gathering dust.
The final days of August saw home prices and the median price per square foot flatline compared to last year, even as the selling pace slowed down.
“Affordability constraints are keeping buyers on the sidelines this summer, leading to frustration among sellers and home builders who remain unable to sell homes at the prices and in the amount of time they had hoped for,” says Realtor.com® Senior Economist Joel Berner.
The share of listings offering price reductions during the week ending on Aug. 30 was in line with the same period in 2024, but many fed-up sellers are choosing to remove their listings from the market and wait for better days, rather than settle for offers below their expectations.
End-of-month inventory of for-sale homes was elevated compared to last year, but the rate of growth has ticked down, according to the latest weekly housing market trends report from Realtor.com.
Fresh listings growth hits five-month low
New home listings—a measure of homeowners putting properties up for sale—edged up by a mere 0.7% last week compared to a year ago.
Berner says this marks the lowest rate of annual growth since April 2025, driven by would-be home sellers’ apprehension to list their properties during what has been a sluggish summer hampered by economic uncertainty, affordability challenges, and elevated mortgage interest rates.
“The best time of year to buy a home, usually in early-to-mid-October, is on the horizon, but buyers may be seeing more homes that have sat on the market all summer than freshly listed ones as this prime buying period approaches,” predicts Berner.
Inventory growth eases
The number of active listings on the market increased 19.5% from last year, down from the previous week’s 20.3% pace. This marks the 11th consecutive week of slowing growth.
Still, the week ending on Aug. 30 was the 95th straight week of annual gains in inventory. There were about 1.1 million homes for sale, marking the 18th week in a row over the million-listing threshold.
“Active inventory is growing significantly faster than new listings, an indication that more homes are sitting on the market for longer,” according to Berner.
Home prices stagnate again
For the fourth week in a row, the national median listing price remained the same as it was a year ago and saw a 0.2% decrease since the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, price per square foot, which adjusts for home size, also remained flat on an annual basis, which Berner points out is a relatively new development.
“Price per square foot had been growing steadily for almost two years, but the weak sales activity has finally caught up and stalled out this metric, which is a close proxy for home values,” explains the economist.
Meanwhile, the glacial summer selling pace has persisted, with the typical listing spending eight days longer waiting for a buyer than a year ago.
The main reason for the dogs days of summer slowdown is that many buyers are simply not interested in making a move at this time.
“We’ve shown a major bifurcation in the market, with many Northeastern markets moving significantly faster than Southern and Western ones, but the slowdown in more subdued markets is driving the national days on market up,” notes Berner.