Are there now more home sellers than buyers?

The areas in the country which exploded during COVID (ergo most appreciation) are the one's most likely to drop now. It's started. The impact when the one in five homes owned by investors start to implode hasn't been felt...yet. Ergo, people who rent and have 2% mortages (which are generally short term) are soon going to find their new 7% rate will cause their investment to turn sour...forcing a sale. This could hit certain areas especially hard.

For example, Miami's housing stock is one third investors.

New Real-Estate Math: Half a Million More Sellers Than Buyers

New listings haven’t been enough to jolt the housing market out of its slumber

By Nicole Friedman, WSJ

June 14, 2025 5:30 am ET

• There were almost 500,000 more sellers than buyers in the U.S. housing market in April, according to Redfin.

• High prices and mortgage rates above 6.5% are keeping buyers away, leading to slow sales and price declines in some areas.

• Some markets in the Northeast and Midwest still favor sellers.

The inventory of homes for sale is finally rising. Buyers aren’t interested.

The U.S. housing market had nearly a half million more sellers than buyers in April, the biggest such gap on record in seasonally adjusted data going back to 2013, according to an analysis by real-estate brokerage Redfin.

After years of frustration with fast-rising prices and bidding wars, buyers now have the upper hand in many parts of the country. More sellers are cutting prices or offering concessions such as paying for buyers’ closing costs.

A historic shortage of homes for sale is a big reason why the housing market has been stuck near its slowest sales pace in three decades. Buyers were frustrated with a lack of options, and desirable homes often sparked bidding wars.

Now, supply is rising because some sellers have experienced life events that require them to move, like a job relocation or having a baby. Others are unloading investment properties because their costs are rising, or they are worried that home prices will fall and want to sell before that happens, real-estate agents say.

The new listings haven’t been enough to jolt the housing market out of its slumber. Existing-home sales in April fell for the second consecutive month, notching the slowest sales pace for any April since 2009.

Many buyers are still priced out. Home prices are up more than 50% in the last five years and mortgage rates are holding above 6.5%. Buyers are also feeling economic uncertainty, which tends to discourage major purchases like a new home.

The mismatch between buyers and sellers is a sign that home prices could decline slightly on a national basis later this year, said Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research.

U.S. home prices rose 1.4% in May from a year earlier, according to Intercontinental Exchange, a slowdown from 2% annual growth in April. Prices fell from the prior May in 24 of the 100 biggest metro areas, mostly across the Sunbelt.

“It doesn’t feel like buyer demand is going to come back that much,” Zhao said. “Prices are just too high.”

Active listings are still about 14% below typical prepandemic levels. But they rose in May to the highest level since 2019, according to Realtor.com, which is operated by News Corp, parent of The Wall Street Journal.

The biggest buyers’ markets are in the Southeast and Southwest, where the inventory of homes for sale is above prepandemic levels. The Miami metro area had almost three times as many sellers as buyers in April, Redfin said.

“There will be more price reductions that are going on, and more willingness to sell at a lower number, especially in the next couple months,” said Jeff Lichtenstein, president of Echo Fine Properties in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. “We’ve definitely seen people who have taken losses.”

But some markets in the Northeast and Midwest still have more buyers than sellers, with Newark, N.J., tilted the most in sellers’ favor, according to Redfin. Home shoppers in many of those markets are still facing competition for properties.

Home-building activity in the U.S. plummeted from 2006 to 2009 and took years to recover, leaving the market undersupplied when millennials started looking to buy homes. Then when mortgage rates surged in 2022, would-be home sellers couldn’t afford to give up their current low mortgage rates and opted to stay put instead.

Those trends are starting to change. New-home construction rose during the pandemic. And while many homeowners are still unwilling to move, others have had life events that mean they can’t keep waiting to sell.

“There’s not even usually a home for sale in our neighborhood, and I think there’s three or four right now,” said Dirk Lovelace, who listed his Tryon, N.C., house for sale in April. Lovelace is selling because he now lives with his wife in South Carolina, and the costs of owning the North Carolina house have risen.

Lovelace cut his listing price in May, but he hasn’t gotten any offers. He thinks buyers are nervous. “The current sentiment is, the market’s probably going to go down further, so people are just waiting,” he said.

Some homeowners who bought their first homes in 2020 or 2021 now have children and need to upgrade, said Elle Pappas, an agent at Thrive Real Estate Group in Denver.

But unlike a few years ago, when she helped clients strategize about how to win bidding wars, buyers are now holding out for a deal, she said.

“The immediate conversation, even upon the first appointment I have with them, is, ‘How much of a discount do you think I can get? How many concessions can I get?’” Pappas said.

There are some signs of life in the market. Mortgage purchase applications in the week ended June 6 rose 20% from a year earlier, an indication that home shoppers are still hoping to purchase this spring, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. And 26% of consumers surveyed by Fannie Mae in May said it was a good time to buy a home, up from 23% the prior month.

Carley and Garrett Kapelski tried to buy their first home in the Kansas City suburbs in 2023 but decided to wait because the market was too competitive. This spring, they are seeing more available homes in their price range, Garrett Kapelski said.

“We feel a lot less stressed this time,” he said. “If we wait another 30, 60 days, maybe you’ll see these people that thought they would be able to sell their houses quickly, and maybe already bought another home, start being willing to wiggle a little bit.”

Write to Nicole Friedman at nicole.friedman@wsj.com