Redfin’s fresh housing market report delivers one of those rare moments where the headline and the lived experience just don’t add up.
On paper, 2025 has officially been the strongest buyer’s market the company has ever tracked, with a staggering 36.8% more sellers than buyers nationwide.
That’s a clear structural shift, but anyone who’s been house-hunting lately probably isn’t celebrating.
Prices continue to climb, and while mortgage rates are “better,” perhaps in the loosest sense, affordability hasn’t improved.
Hence, what Redfin is flagging isn’t your usual market flip, but more of a slow-building imbalance that’s broken into the open.
A shifting housing market gives buyers theoretical leverage, but affordability pressures and uneven regional trends complicate things.
Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images
The buyer’s market that doesn’t feel like one
Redfin’s numbers suggest that buyers should finally be catching a break in what’s been a rough patch, to say the least.
However, the reality on the ground speaks to a different story. Though inventory levels are improving, the experience of home shopping still feels anything but straightforward.
Supply surges, demand slips, but prices still won’t crack
Redfin’s numbers point to a buyer-tilted market, but also one that has clearly pulled out of shape.
By October, the U.S. had a 36.8% seller surplus, meaning that over 528,000 homeowners were listing their properties without enough buyers to meet with them.
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That healthy imbalance is building since mid-2024, but the Sun Belt is where things are at full boil, with metros such as San Antonio and Austin posting triple-digit gaps between sellers and buyers.
Typically, that sort of supply pressure would cool prices.
Instead, national home prices are still rising, up 2.3% year over year, with October showing the largest monthly price gain in seven months.
It’s the strange contradiction where there’s overflowing inventory on one side, while stubbornly firm pricing on the other.
Affordability still feels punishing
Mortgage rates eased off their highs, but they still haven’t budged enough to change how brutal buying a home feels.
For more color, the average 30-year rate is hovering in the 6.2% to 6.3% range. This gave October closings a small bump, but it was far from a real recovery.
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Buyers aren’t looking to rush back in, which in part has to do with the math involved in catering to the millions of households.
Inventory has climbed to 1.52 million homes, but it’s still far below pre-pandemic levels, and hardly any of those listings fall into anything “affordable.”
For first-timers, the pain is the most pronounced.
They effectively made up just 34% of October buyers, dropping behind the historical 40% norm, and just 21% of buyers over the past year, an all-time low.
National price gauges underscore the trend, where the Case-Shiller index tracks closer to 1.5% to 1.7%, which is nominally higher but still essentially flat or even worse, considering the impact of inflation.
That metric is basically what I’d like to call the housing market’s “price truth serum,” seeing how home values change over time through measurements of repeat sales of the same properties.
Sun Belt oversupply meets Northeast scarcity
The Redfin report in many ways shows off a housing market that’s basically moving in two different directions simultaneously.
On a national level, the numbers show that buyers finally have leverage, but the shift is far from being evenly distributed.
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We have some regions that are cooling quicker due to oversupply, while others behave like the past three years never happened. Put simply, geography matters more than any headline.
The buyer’s market Redfin is covering is eventually spearheaded by the Sun Belt, where oversupply has caught up with sluggish migration and stretched affordability. Texas and Florida dominate the list:
- San Antonio: 117% more sellers than buyers
- Austin: 115% more sellers than buyers
- Dallas-Fort Worth & Houston: Also deeply seller-heavy
On top of that, the pricing data underscores the cooling.
Case-Shiller shows year-over-year drops in Tampa (-2.8%), San Francisco (-1.9%), and Miami (-1.3%), along with the first monthly national drop of 2025.
Builders are also pulling back, with single-family starts in the South having fallen 17% by one estimate.
Similarly, the Northeast and parts of the Midwest are still tight, with the Tri-State area still leaning toward sellers.