MW Home sellers get a reality check even as sales pace inches up

By Aarthi Swaminathan

'We decided to take our lumps and move on,' one seller says

The median price of an existing home in July was $422,400, according to the National Association of Realtors.

It took nearly nine months for Bob Neuman to sell his 95-year-old mother's home in Naples, Fla.

After moving his mother to an assisted-living facility, the 66-year-old Neuman did not want to hold on to her house, in part because he lives across the country in Colorado. The house was paid off; his mother had purchased it with cash 22 years ago. Neuman has other rental properties and knows the headaches associated with managing them - especially from another state.

"I really didn't want to get on the hamster wheel with this property," he told MarketWatch. He would need to screen prospective tenants and possibly upgrade the house to make it an attractive rental, he said, so he put it up for sale last December.

He had expected the market to be slow. But he didn't anticipate it would take the better part of a year to sell the house. The house spent about 209 days on the market before finally selling. And even then, Neuman had to compromise: He had to cut the asking price from $325,000 to $260,000, a 20% price drop.

"We had hoped for something $40,000 or $50,000 higher but ... we decided to take our lumps and move on," Neuman said. He plans to put the proceeds from the sale into a certificate of deposit for his mother.

Neuman's experience underscores the listlessness of the housing market this summer. Sellers across much of the country are facing one of the slowest real-estate markets in the last decade. With homes taking a lot longer to sell, a rising number of sellers are resorting to cutting their asking prices, while others are abandoning plans to sell altogether as they get few compelling offers for their properties - a practice referred to as delisting.

Inventory levels are at their highest since May 2020, Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, told reporters on a call Thursday.

The national housing market remains frozen. Existing-home sales rose slightly in July but remained at a relatively low level as buyers continued to stay out of the market. Homes are still too expensive for many, with the median price hitting a record high of $435,300 in June. And despite some recent downward movements, elevated mortgage rates remain another barrier.

"Given that price increases are very minimal and incomes are now rising ... one can say that things are a little better today [for] buyers as compared to a couple of years ago," Yun said, adding that buyers are even in a position to negotiate better prices.

Price reductions in some parts of the country could also be bringing more buyers back to the market, he added.

Sales of existing homes tick up in July

Existing-home sales rose by 2% in July to a 4.01 million pace from the previous month. That's the number of homes that would be sold over an entire year if sales took place at the same rate in every month as they did in July. The numbers are seasonally adjusted.

"We've been stuck at this 4 million level ... for the past two and a half years," Yun said.

Home sales are up 0.8% from a year ago.

The pace of sales exceeded the expectations of economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal, who forecast home sales to fall to a 3.91 million pace in July.

The median price for an existing home in July was $422,400, the NAR said, an all-time high for that month. Home prices grew 0.2% from the same month a year earlier, the smallest gain since June 2023, when prices fell 0.9%.

Nationally, 21% of homes were sold above list price, down from 24% the same month a year earlier. Homes received an average of 2.1 offers.

The total number of homes listed on the market in July rose 15.7% from last year, to 1.55 million units. There is a 4.6-month supply of unsold inventory, which is considered by the industry to be a balanced level.

"We are now seeing the highest inventory [level] in over five years," Yun said. Prior to the pandemic, inventory levels were even higher, with around 1.8 million homes or more on the market, he added.

All-cash buyers made up 31% of sales, a slightly elevated share. The share of individual investors or second-home buyers was 20%, while 28% of buyers were first-timers.

Homes linger on the market for longer

The NAR data also revealed that listed homes remained on the market for 28 days on average, up from June. Last July, homes sold more quickly, in 24 days.

Some sellers are responding to the slower pace of sales by cutting prices. In July, the share of homes that had their asking price reduced was 27.4% nationwide, according to a report by the real-estate platform Zillow (Z). That was the highest share for that month since Zillow began tracking the figure in 2018. The trend was most prevalent in Denver, Colo.; Raleigh, N.C.; and Dallas, Texas.

Builders have also been aggressive in offering deals and cutting prices to sell homes, as MarketWatch has reported previously. About two-thirds of builders said they offered some type of sales incentive to lure buyers in August.

Read more: Home builders boost sales incentives to 5-year high as they struggle to sell newly built homes

As builders work through the backlog of newly built homes for sale, it's also leading to increased competition among sellers in places like Naples. "We've got a lot of new construction happening, and that is one of the challenges that the Florida resale market is facing," Sue Pinky Benson, Neuman's real-estate agent with Re/Max Alliance Group, told MarketWatch.

Some buyers are opting to purchase brand-new properties for a little more, she added, instead of buying an existing home that may need some work done, and that's leading to lower demand for existing homes.

-Aarthi Swaminathan

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August 21, 2025 10:17 ET (14:17 GMT)

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