US HOUSING MARKET RELISTINGS HIT HIGHEST NUMBER IN A DECADE
Almost 45,000 for-sale homes that were taken off the market last year were listed in January, according to a new Redfin study, as sellers hope the spring homebuying season will revitalize the sleepy U.S. housing market.
It was the highest January number in records dating back a decade, promising to boost housing supply and give buyers more negotiating power over sellers.
Why It Matters
Dwindling sales and growing inventory nationwide over the past year have led to a massive imbalance between sellers and buyers in the U.S. housing market—with sellers now outnumbering buyers by more than 600,000, or 44 percent.
The availability of more homes for sale, together with buyers’ reluctance to purchase them due to ongoing affordability issues, have helped put a damper on the vertiginous home price growth reported in the country since the pandemic. In January, the median sale price of a home was $423,029, according to Redfin, up by 1.1 percent compared to a year earlier.
While this is a positive trend for would-be buyers struggling with high prices and elevated borrowing costs, experts began reporting last year that growing numbers of sellers were withdrawing from the market, delisting their properties when they could not sell them at the price they wanted.
What To Know
The high number of relistings in January suggests that many homeowners who stepped back from the market last year after sensing a shift in favor of buyers are now returning to it.
The relistings in January account for 3.6 percent of active listings in the same month; notably, 36.1 percent of relisted homes returned at a lower price than their original list price—the highest January share dating back to 2016. This shows that these sellers are aware that buyers are now in a position to ask for lower prices, and they are trying to make their listings competitive.
In the sharply divided U.S. housing market, Americans’ ability to find good deals this spring homebuying season will likely depend on where they are in the country.
Redfin’s metro-level analysis shows that relistings were most common in pricey West Coast markets such as the Bay Area, while they were least common in affordable parts of the Northeast and Midwest, such as Pittsburgh.
San Jose, California, had the highest share of relistings of the country’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas, equal to 12.5 percent of homes that were on the market in January.
It was followed by two other Bay Area metros: San Francisco, at 11.4 percent, and Oakland, at 10.2 percent. Next came Seattle and Denver at 8.3 percent and 7.4 percent, respectively.
The lowest levels of relistings were in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1.7 percent); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2.2 percent); Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (2.2 percent); Virginia Beach, Virginia (2.3 percent); and Kansas City, Missouri (2.3 percent).
What People Are Saying
Andrew Vallejo, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Austin, Texas, said in the Redfin report: “Many sellers who pulled their homes off the market last year are relisting now in hopes of capitalizing on spring homebuying season. I’m working with one couple who plans to relist their current home as soon as they close the deal on the house they’re in the process of buying. Their house was on the market last year, but they didn’t have an incentive to lower the price enough to attract buyers because they hadn’t yet found their dream home.”
Redfin Senior Economist Asad Khan said in the Redfin report: “Homebuyers are already scoring discounts because there are more homes for sale than people who want to buy them, and it’s possible those discounts will get bigger if relistings boost supply further. Some sellers will be more flexible on price when they relist since they’ve already been burned once. Buyers shouldn’t be shy about asking for concessions; even if the list price is high on paper, the seller may be open to negotiating.”
What Happens Next
Experts believe that a combination of rising inventory and lower mortgage rates will bring some buyers back to the market, boosting sales in the sluggish U.S. housing market.
But the improvement likely won’t be massive: Active listings are still down 17 percent from 2019, signaling that the U.S. is still in the midst of a housing shortage, and mortgage rates are still double what they were during the pandemic.
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2026-03-06T11:43:50Z
