Homes Are Selling for Much Less Than You Think | July 2026 Housing Market Update

**Dave Meyer** (0:00)
Are homes secretly cheaper than you think right now? All the data shows that the housing market is flat. Nationwide, the average home costs about the same today as it did a year ago. But those sale prices don't tell the whole story because nearly half of all homes sold right now come with a seller concession. Sellers are willing to pay your closing costs, buy down your mortgage rate, or to make costly repairs just to get you to buy their properties. Seller concessions are more common now than in any other year we have data for. On homes that sell with a concession, they average close to 5% of the purchase price. That could easily be the difference between a deal penciling or not. And that's our big story in this July's Housing Market Update.
What's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at BiggerPockets. Today, I'm giving you my monthly update on all the data in the housing market. We'll cover trends in home prices, the risks of a real estate crash, the rise in seller concessions and more. Let's dive in. First up, let's just talk about where the housing market is at this year. I'll just give you the big picture headline here. Really, not that much has changed. And I know if you look at the news, if you look at social media every day, you say someone's saying the market is going to crash or something's going terrible or no one can afford to buy homes. But the reality is we're pretty much where we were three months, six months, 12 months ago. This is why for years now, I have been calling this the great stall because the market is pretty boring and pretty flat. And I'll just share with you the data and information that reflects that. So the first data that we're going to look at is inventory. This is basically how many homes are for sale at any given time in the United States. And it's a really, really important and helpful metric in the housing market because it helps us measure the balance between supply and demand. When inventory is up, that typically means that there are more sellers than buyers, and that creates a buyer's market and prices tend to go down in those kinds of market. When inventory is going down, that points to a seller's market. It means there's more buyers than sellers, and that tends to lead to rising prices. What we have right now in terms of inventory is dead flat. It's basically exactly the same, less than 1% difference year over year. And when I say year over year, just so you know, what I'm doing is comparing this week or this month in 2026 to the previous year. So I'm talking about June of 2026 versus June of 2025 And the reason I do this and talk about this year over year data is because housing is seasonal. You can't really compare January inventory to July inventory because there are always these patterns where inventory and sales are lower over the winter, they go up over the summer. And so that's why you compare year over year. And what we see is inventory is exactly the same. And so all these people saying that housing prices are going to explode because we have inflation and inflation pushes up prices, that hasn't happened. All the people saying that the market is going to crash because everything is unaffordable and no one can buy a home also hasn't happened. What we are seeing instead is inventory is almost exactly the same as it was last year. It's kind of boring. But beneath the surface there, there are some variances that are important here. So there's sort of this subcategory of inventory called new listings, which is basically how many people are putting their homes up for sale in a given month. And this is different from inventory because inventory is how many homes are for sale. They could have been listed six months ago or three months ago or a month ago. New listings are just like how many new ones hit the market, the MLS this month. Those are actually going up. Those are up about eight percent. And that is notable because when you start to see new listings go up, oftentimes what can happen is inventory goes up too. That's more supply. And then you start to see prices go down. But inventory hasn't changed, right? So you're seeing new listings go up and inventory and flat. How do you square that? Well, that means that buyers are scooping up those new listings. It means people are coming in beyond what we had last year and buying those new listings. Basically, new demand is offsetting it. Like if these new listings were sitting on the market and we were starting to see this snowball effect that often precedes a deep correction or even a crash, we would see inventory go up, but we aren't. And this is reflected in other data. Like we can verify that this is what's happening because we also see this in pending sales. Pending sales are up 6% year over year. So if you want a holistic picture, a clear picture of what's going on, the market is still sluggish. It's not very exciting. More people are listing their homes for sale by a little bit. Nothing crazy, 8%.