Delistings—the “ultimate sign of a non-functioning market,” according to Realtor.com®—appear to be slowing down as summer is coming to close, according to a new report by the portal.
Realtor.com’s August 2026 Monthly Housing Trends Report found that delistings fell 12.6% year-over-year, and saw no “notable” spike in either July or August. The “quit rate” (delistings as a share of active inventory) has also remained flat around 5.5% for the past six weeks.
That news alleviates at least some worries that an already sluggish market was trending toward more trouble, in the face of macro headwinds and consumer hesitancy that the housing market has (so far) managed to shoulder through.
One potential reason for the decrease is improvements to an increase in “pricing realism,” as Senior Economist Jake Krimmel pointed out.
“The good news is sellers’ pricing realism has helped the market sidestep a repeat of 2025, when the market stalled with buyers and sellers too far apart and unwilling or unable to budge,” he explained.
August did mark the 10th consecutive month of year-over-year list-price declines, down 1.3% to $424,500 (and down 1% month-over-month). The median list price was also down 1.9% from August 2022.
The report also included some unequivocally positive signs. With delistings down, active listings were also up 1.2% month-over-month and 3.6% year-over-year. Realtor.com specifically noted that this was the “fastest annual growth rate so far this year.”
Inventory gains were seen in all four regions: the Midwest was up 10.5%, the Northeast +9.1%, the West 3.2% and the South +1.1%. Additionally, 36 of the 50 largest metros saw year-over-year inventory growth, led by Minneapolis (+32.9%), Buffalo (+29.8%) and Seattle (+27.3%).
However, as the market moves into late summer and is soon to transition into fall, Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale noted that “August’s data shows a housing market entering its seasonal cool-down.”
“Higher mortgage rates are meeting a point in the calendar when activity typically slows, and buyers appear to be responding more selectively,” she explained.
In line with this trend, the report found that pending listings were down 0.2% year-over-year in August, a fall that put an end to an eight-month streak of increases. Contract signings were also down 3.7% year-over-year.
Price cuts also remained elevated due to higher rates and slower activity, clocking in at 20.4%. While this is equal to last year’s August rate, it is slightly up from July and above both 2019 and 2022 data.
“August brings a mixed reading: buyer demand softened and price cuts rose modestly above last year’s pace, but sellers are still showing more patience than they did during last year’s late-summer delisting wave,” Krimmel concluded. “That difference is helping the market avoid a repeat of 2025’s more severe seller pullback, at least for now.”
The state of the slowdown
In last month’s housing trends report from Realtor.com, Krimmel said that the industry would be on “‘housing market resilience watch’ for the foreseeable future” as it was hard to tell at the time whether the summer slowdown was purely seasonal, or cause for concern.
Now with August data under the belt, Krimmel said it is unfortunately still “hard to say how much of August’s slowdown is seasonal versus real headwinds finally catching up.”
“There were already seasonal housing market headwinds, and the rate backdrop isn’t helping matters,” he clarified. “The year-over-year rate advantage has disappeared: as recently as June, rates were running more than 30 basis points below year-ago levels; by August, they were running roughly 10 basis points above. That shift should color how we read this month’s year-over-year numbers.”
“Regardless of whether it’s due to dog-days of summer seasonality or real signal, housing activity is slowing for now,” Krimmel added.
As the housing market navigates its way into September, Krimmel said the indicators to watch are whether the delisting gap from 2025 continues to grow, and whether price cuts continue to shrink and fall.
