She cut her asking price by $100,000. The real discount was still bigger

Liz Suder listed her home in Murphy, Texas, for $750,000 in April 2025. More than a year later, she sold it for $650,000. That is a $100,000 price cut. On top of that, she also gave the buyer $9,000 toward closing costs, according to an Associated Press report published on 25 October 2026.

Add the two together and Suder walked away with $641,000 for a house she first listed at $750,000. That is a $109,000 gap, or 14.5% below her original asking price.

Suder is not alone. Across the United States, sellers are stuck in a market where they easily outnumber the people who want to buy.

Why do sellers now outnumber buyers by so much?

Because buyers have mostly stopped showing up. Across the 50 biggest US cities, there are now 63% more sellers than buyers, according to data cited in the AP report. Realtor.com counted just 929,000 active buyers nationwide, the fewest on record since 2013.

Homes are sitting. The National Association of Realtors reported 1.6 million homes for sale in September 2026, a 4.8-month supply. That is up from 4.5 months a year earlier, and it means it would take almost five months to sell everything currently listed at the current sales pace.

Sellers are noticing. Realtor.com found that 21% of September listings had a price cut, the highest share in four years.

Photo: Salinas_mcMansion.jpg: Brendel derivative work: NVO (talk) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5

Rick Ganga listed his three-bedroom home in Blaine, Washington, in June for $825,000. He cut the price to under $800,000. He still has not had a single offer. Ethan Butner, in Troutdale, Oregon, cut his $480,000 listing by $30,000 and still watched a buyer walk away after two months.

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Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Financial, says the shift is simple. "The dynamic has shifted back toward more of what we call buyers' markets rather than sellers' markets," he told the AP. That means a seller might have to reduce the price, offer a concession, or wait longer, sometimes all three.

What is a seller concession, and why is almost half the country paying one?

A concession is cash a seller gives the buyer that does not show up as a lower sticker price. It can cover closing costs, repairs, or a lower interest rate on the buyer's loan. It is a second, hidden discount stacked on top of any price cut.

Redfin found that 44.7% of US home sales in August 2026 included a seller concession, up from 42.6% a year earlier and the highest August share in its records going back to 2020. In May 2026 the share hit 46.2%, also a record for that month.

It varies hugely by city. In Nashville, 75.5% of sellers gave a concession. In New York City, only 2.9% did.

Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com, says the rising concession rate is a signal in itself. "It's sort of like an indicator of where the market is right now, with buyers gaining leverage," he said.

What does a 5% price cut actually cost a seller on a $400,000 home?

On a typical $400,000 asking price, a 5% price cut plus a 3% seller concession costs the seller $31,400, almost 8% of what they originally hoped to get.

Source: Worked example built from the national price-cut rate (Realtor.com, September 2026) and the national seller concession rate (Redfin, August 2026).

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That table is the part the headlines skip. A seller who only reads the new, lower list price never sees the second discount sitting underneath it.

Why are mortgage rates still the real problem?

Because borrowing a mortgage got a lot more expensive in the past year, and that is what is scaring buyers away in the first place. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 7.4% in October 2026, the highest in nearly three years, before easing slightly to 7.32% by 22 October, according to Freddie Mac. A year earlier, the same loan averaged 6.19%.

6.19%Oct 2025

7.32%Oct 2026

Oct 2025	6.19%
Oct 2026	7.32%

Source: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, 22 Oct 2026

That jump matters in real money. On a $320,000 loan, which is what a buyer borrows after putting 20% down on a $400,000 home, the monthly payment went from $1,958 a year ago to $2,198 now. That is $240 more every month, or $2,884 more a year, for the exact same loan.

Photo: David E. Lucas / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Over the life of a 30-year mortgage, a rate jump like this adds far more than most buyers expect, which is why even a single percentage point pushes so many of them out of the market entirely. Our breakdown of what a $300,000 mortgage really costs over 30 years walks through the full total. Higher borrowing costs are squeezing budgets well beyond housing too, in the same way rising rates are already hitting bond repayments and fuel bills together.

Is this actually worse than the 2022 peak?

Nationally, prices have not crashed. The Case-Shiller national home price index was still about 9.3% above its June 2022 peak as of July 2026, in plain dollar terms. But once inflation is stripped out, real home values have been falling for 14 straight months and sat below the 2022 peak as of that same month.

The bigger change is how a sale actually happens now. In June 2022, more than 55% of US homes sold above their asking price, and January 2022 was the most competitive month on record, with 70% of offers facing a bidding war. There were barely any concessions worth tracking.

Flip that around now. Instead of buyers bidding sellers up, sellers are now cutting prices and writing checks to close the gap.

That is the twist sitting inside every one of these stories. The listing price tells you what a seller is asking. It does not tell you what they are actually giving up to get the keys handed over. Liz Suder's new asking price said $650,000. Her real number, once the concession is counted, was $641,000, and the true gap from where she started was $109,000, not the $100,000 the headline price cut alone suggests.