The share of U.S. home listings with a price cut rose to 20% in July, up from 18.8% in June, as rising mortgage rates and seasonal buyer fatigue stalled what had been a resilient spring selling season, according to Realtor.com’s July housing trends report, released Monday.
For the first six months of the year, sellers had largely priced realistically from the start, keeping price cuts below year-ago levels; by the end of June, the share of listings with reductions ran 1.9 percentage points lower than a year earlier. That gap has now closed. July’s 20% price-cut share is nearly even with July 2025, reversing months of relative improvement.
“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,” said Jake Krimmel, Realtor.com’s senior economist. “So while the realistic pricing narrative is still there, the story has weakened a bit recently.”
Regional and metro divergence
Price cuts remain least common in the tighter-supply Northeast (13.7% of listings) and Midwest (18.7%), while the better-supplied West (21.9%) and South (21.3%) continue to see more discounting. But even the historically tight Northeast and Midwest are showing early softening: their price-cut shares rose 1 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively, compared with July 2025.
At the metro level, more than a quarter of listings carried a price cut in July across 12 of the 50 largest U.S. metros, nearly all of them in the West or South. Portland, Ore., reclaimed the top spot at 31%, edging out June’s leader, Denver, which slipped to second at 30.9%. Dallas and Austin, Texas, tied for third at 28.3%.
Cory Culpepper, an agent with Douglas Elliman in Austin, told Realtor.com that price cuts often trace back to sellers listing above market value from the outset, betting on a strong offer or padding room to cover a buyer’s closing costs. That strategy can backfire, he said: homes that linger raise buyer suspicion. “The cons outweigh the pros because sellers take a huge risk of ‘testing the market,’ only later to find their property with too many days on the market and now becoming the problem house,” Culpepper said.
Rates, not just seasonality, are driving the shift
The report ties the July slowdown partly to the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold its benchmark rate steady in a 9-3 vote in late July, with three officials pushing for a hike. That decision pushed the 10-year Treasury yield higher, and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.66%, its highest level in a year, the following day. Krimmel said the ongoing conflict in Iran, which has kept oil prices elevated since February, is complicating the rate outlook: Realtor.com’s revised midyear forecast had penciled in mortgage rates easing to around 6.3% for the rest of the year, a view predicated on cooling Middle East tensions that Krimmel now says may prove too optimistic.
Nationally, asking prices fell for a ninth consecutive month, at a near-record pace, settling at a median $428,950, down 2.4% from July 2025. The typical listing spent 57 days on the market, one day less than a year earlier β the first annual decline in time-on-market in more than two years. Active listings edged up slightly, while new listings flatlined year over year after running above 2025 levels through the spring.
What it means
Realtor.com frames the data as a market that is “plateauing,” not collapsing, and Krimmel notes that price cuts paired with steady time-on-market can reflect a healthy shift toward buyers rather than distress. That interpretation is Realtor.com’s own reading of its data; the underlying numbers β the price-cut share, median asking price and days-on-market figures β are the firmest, most directly verifiable facts in the report. What to watch: whether the Iran conflict keeps oil prices and mortgage rates elevated into the fall, which Krimmel flagged as the key risk to Realtor.com’s own rate forecast, and whether the Northeast and Midwest’s early upticks in price cuts turn into a broader pattern next month.
