Home buyers are outnumbered by sellers in many places as the real-estate market undergoes a big shift. – Getty Images
Nora Douglas was looking to buy a home in Atlanta in January but then hit the brakes on her search.
The 27-year-old works in software in the healthcare industry and was looking to buy a multifamily property where she could live in one unit and rent the others out. She already owned a duplex and was looking to expand her real-estate portfolio with a second purchase.
Douglas was keen on buying in January to get a jump on the spring home-buying season, which is normally busy. “I usually have this theory that things tend to be cheaper during the winter,” she said. But mortgage rates were so high in January — over 7% — that she decided to put her money into the stock market instead.
Since then, the housing market has slowed down meaningfully, and Douglas has decided to jump back in. As sellers become increasingly frustrated, buyers like Douglas are seeing opportunities.
“Properties are staying on the market for much longer. Listing agents are slashing prices by the tens of thousands [of dollars],” she said. “Even though interest rates are high, buyers have a lot of options right now, so I think it’s a really good time right now for buyers.”
The average rate for a 30-year mortgage was 6.86% as of May 22, according to Freddie Mac FMCC.
Douglas isn’t the only one feeling more optimistic about the housing market as it tilts away from sellers and toward buyers in many parts of the U.S. Homes are taking longer to sell and inventory is rising quickly, giving buyers in some markets plenty of choices for the first time in years.
“With housing inventory levels reaching five-year highs, home buyers in nearly every region of the country are in a better position to negotiate more favorable terms,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said in a statement.
Pending home sales fell in April as buyers pulled back amid economic uncertainty and volatility in the financial markets.
Contract signings in the U.S. fell 6.3% in April from the previous month, according to a monthly index released by the NAR. That’s the biggest drop in over two years, since September 2022.
“At this critical stage of the housing market, it is all about mortgage rates,” Yun said, referring to rates that have been volatile but that have hovered around 6.5%, on average, in 2025. “Despite an increase in housing inventory, we are not seeing higher home sales.”
Pending sales reflect transactions where the contract has been signed for the sale of an existing home, but the sale has not yet closed. Economists view it as an indicator of the direction of existing-home sales in subsequent months.
The pending sales pace missed expectations on Wall Street. The median forecast was for a drop of 1% in April, based on a survey of economists conducted by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal.
Many local real-estate markets now have a glut of inventory, and some sellers are resorting to price cuts to make their property more attractive.
Home-buying sentiment remains mostly glum, but there are signs of a turnaround due to increased inventory and price cuts, even as high mortgage rates and home prices remain a problem for most buyers. Some buyers have also hit pause on their purchase plans because of concerns about job security and fears that the economy could enter a recession.
Mortgage applications, a leading measure of home-buying sentiment, fell in the last week. Purchase applications, which refer to applications for a mortgage with the intention of purchasing a home, fell 1.2% over the week of May 23, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
But applications were still up on a year-over-year basis and were running ahead of last year’s pace, the industry group said.
Even as houses remain expensive and out of reach for many aspiring homeowners, some buyers, especially people who already own a home, are finding compelling reasons to jump into the market now, while it’s relatively quiet.
Francis Shaw is upgrading to a bigger home in Charlotte, N.C., and said he’s feeling grateful for a slower market, because it has allowed him to be more selective.
The 38-year-old, who works in the staffing industry, has played the real-estate market carefully over the last decade. He bought his first home in 2014 for $100,000, and another in 2017 for $160,000. Both are in Charlotte, and both have brought in significant income as rentals. Both of those homes have also appreciated significantly, he said, and the interest rates on the mortgages that he used to finance them were 3% or lower, which made them worthwhile investments.
Even though the market has radically shifted, it hasn’t put him off buying again. He’s living in his third property and wants to buy a fourth. He figures that with the market being slow, he could potentially benefit from home-price appreciation in the future.
Shaw may have to take on a 30-year jumbo loan at over 7% for his next house, but he isn’t too concerned about the high rate of interest.
“I get to be more selective,” he said. If he waited for rates to go down, he said, he might face more competition, or a seller might go with another buyer who offered more money.
(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, which is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
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