Sellers handed buyers a concession in 44.7% of U.S. home sales in August, the highest share for an August in records going back to at least 2020, according to a report Redfin published Sept. 18. A year earlier the share was 42.6%.
The 2.1-percentage-point increase is modest on its own. What makes it worth attention is where the concessions are concentrated: in the Sun Belt metros that built most aggressively during the pandemic, sellers are now buying their way to a closing in roughly seven of every 10 deals.
What counts as a concession
Redfin’s figures come from data submitted by its buyers’ agents nationwide, covering rolling three-month periods since 2020. “August” here means the three months ending Aug. 31, 2026. A concession is logged when an agent reports the seller provided something that reduced the buyer’s total cost of purchasing β money toward repairs, closing-cost credits, a mortgage-rate buydown.
Critically, it does not include a seller lowering the list price, or cutting the price during negotiation. Concessions are the discounts that never show up in the sale price, which is why the headline price data in a softening market tends to understate how much ground sellers have actually given.
Redfin attributes the increase to market balance rather than to any change in seller psychology: August was the strongest buyer’s market in its records dating to 2013. RealtyWire has reported that Redfin counted 58% more sellers than buyers in the market, the widest gap the brokerage has recorded.
Atlanta, Charlotte and Phoenix lead
Eight of the 10 metros where concessions are most common are in the Sun Belt. Atlanta tops the list at 72.8% of August deals, up 3.7 percentage points from a year earlier. Charlotte, N.C., follows at 67.9% (up 9.3 points), then Phoenix at 67.4% (up 15.3 points), Las Vegas at 66.7% and Raleigh, N.C., at 66.3%.
Rounding out the top 10, each at roughly three in five sales: Nashville, Tenn. (63.1%), Houston (58.5%), Denver (58.4%), Riverside, Calif. (58.0%) and Virginia Beach, Va. (57.7%).
Phoenix, Charlotte and Riverside posted the largest year-over-year increases in the country. Redfin notes that Nashville, Houston and Las Vegas rank among the five strongest buyer’s markets in the nation, each with more than twice as many sellers as buyers.
The report ties the pattern to construction: Texas, North Carolina, Arizona and Tennessee had some of the most active building pipelines in the country during the pandemic boom, and those markets are now working through the resulting supply against weaker demand.
“Buyers know they can be picky. They’re asking for every concession under the sun,” said Amanda Peterson, a Redfin Premier agent in Dallas, quoted in the report. “That’s especially true for newly built homes. Builders are offering $10,000 or $20,000 in concessions, buying down mortgage rates and throwing in appliances.”
Peterson described clients who walked away from a home they liked over the size of the pantry and the layout of the laundry room β “even after the sellers offered to alter the floor plan.”
Almost nothing changes hands in San Jose
At the other end, concessions are close to nonexistent in the strongest markets. San Jose, Calif., recorded the lowest rate in the country at 4.2%, down from 10.2% a year earlier. New York follows at 5.7%, then San Francisco at 18.6%, Chicago at 21.9% and Philadelphia at 25.5%.
Redfin counts San Francisco as one of only five seller’s markets in the U.S., which it attributes to the buying power created by the region’s artificial-intelligence boom β a divergence RealtyWire examined in the split between the San Francisco and Seattle housing markets. San Jose, New York and Chicago are described as balanced markets, with roughly as many buyers as sellers.
The concession rate fell in nine of the 29 metros Redfin tracks. The steepest drop was Seattle, at 48.5% in August against roughly 70% a year earlier β a decline Redfin credits largely to a base effect from an unusually high summer 2025 reading. It also points out that 57% of Seattle homes that sold in August went for below asking price, meaning buyers there are still getting discounts, just through the price rather than through credits. San Diego slipped to 57.1% from 62.4%.
The double discount
Nationally, 15.8% of homes that sold in August carried both a price cut and a concession, up from 15.6% a year earlier and the highest August share in Redfin’s records. Roughly one seller in seven is now paying twice.
That combination is the number worth watching. A concession rate can rise simply because more transactions involve new construction, where builder incentives are standard practice. A rising share of sales that need both a price reduction and a credit is a harder signal about what it takes to clear a listing β and one that is easy to miss in reported price data, since the credit portion never reaches the recorded sale price. On our reading, appraisers, lenders and anyone underwriting from comparable sales in Atlanta, Phoenix or Charlotte should assume the effective price in those markets is somewhat below the recorded one.
Redfin cautions that the data is seasonal, which is why August 2026 is compared with prior Augusts rather than with the preceding months. More of RealtyWire’s coverage is in Housing Market.
