Home sales fell 1.7% month over month in May on a seasonally adjusted basis and dropped 2.9% from a year earlier. There have been just two months in the past decade with fewer home sales: October 2023, when mortgage rates jumped to a 23-year high, and May 2020, when the onset of the pandemic brought the housing market to a halt and home sales to a record low.
“Buyers today are facing many of the realities of a hot market even though few homes are changing hands,” said Redfin Senior Economist Elijah de la Campa. “Sales are sluggish because high homebuying costs are making both house hunters and prospective sellers skittish. And with so few homes for sale, buyers in some markets are getting into bidding wars, which is helping push home prices to record highs.”
Sales may pick up later this year if mortgage rates slowly tick down as expected.
The median home sale price rose 5.1% year over year in May to a record $439,716. The average 30-year-fixed mortgage rate hit 7.06%. That’s up from 6.99% one month earlier and 6.43% one year earlier, and is more than double the all-time low of 2.68% during the pandemic. Daily average mortgage rates did drop to their lowest level in about three months this week after the latest CPI report showed that inflation is continuing to cool.
Even though homes are selling for more than ever before, many sellers are still having to lower their list prices after putting their homes on the market—one silver lining for buyers.
Nearly one in five (19.2%) homes for sale in May had a price cut, up from 13.2% a year earlier and just shy of the 21.7% record high set in October 2022.
Some sellers are reducing their prices because they listed their home for too much initially and it ended up sitting on the market. The typical home for sale in May spent 32 days on the market. While that’s comparable with a year earlier, it’s the highest level for any May since the start of the pandemic.
Price drops are particularly common in areas where housing supply has been rising quickly, like Florida and Texas. In these areas, individual home sellers have been facing strong competition from homebuilders.
New listings rose 0.3% month over month in May on a seasonally adjusted basis and climbed 8.8% from a year earlier. Still, they were roughly 20% below pre-pandemic (May 2019) levels. That’s largely because many homeowners don’t want to sell, as they feel “locked in” by the low mortgage rate they scored during the pandemic. 
Active listings, or the total number of homes for sale, rose 0.4% month over month on a seasonally adjusted basis and jumped 11.1% from a year earlier—the largest annual gain since the start of 2023. Still, active listings were about 25% below pre-pandemic levels.
While new listings represent the number of homes that were listed for sale during a given month, active listings represent the total number of homes that were for sale during a given month. That means that the latter metric includes homes that aren’t selling. One reason active listings have risen so much is that in some areas, homes are lingering on the market and getting stale.
Active listings are also soaring along Florida’s southwest Gulf Coast. In North Port, they surged 51.1% year over year on an unadjusted basis—the largest increase in the nation. Next came Tampa (46%) and Cape Coral (45.1%). Those housing markets are cooling faster than anywhere else in the country amid a new-construction boom, intensifying natural disasters and soaring insurance costs, a separate Redfin report found.
Meanwhile, many of the markets that are holding up best and seeing price increases—like Rochester, NY—are relatively affordable and have near-record-low supply.
Note: Data is subject to revision
Data in the bullets below came from a list of 85 U.S. metro areas with populations of at least 750,000. A full metro-level data table can be found in the “download” tab of the dashboard in the monthly section of the Redfin Data Center. Refer to our metrics definition page for explanations of metrics used in this report. Metro-level data is not seasonally adjusted. All changes below represent year-over-year changes.
