If Their Home Is Not Selling At The Current Price, Then It Was Never Worth That In The First Place

A report from the Dallas Morning News in Texas. “The stock of Dallas-Fort Worth housing inventory has increased to 4.7 months. That’s the highest since July 2012. There were 35,555 active listings in the region, up 37.2% from last May. More sellers are double-listing their properties, offering the home for sale or rent. ‘Two, three or four years ago, you’d never hear of anything like this,’ said Todd Luong, a RE/MAX agent in Frisco. ‘A seller wouldn’t ever think about keeping the property as a rental. It never even crossed our mind, because we just knew it was going to sell.’ A few of Luong’s would-be buyers stopped their home search in April, but others are deal-hunting. One of his clients recently got lucky — an accepted offer $30,000 under the asking price. ‘A lot of buyers are making these lowball offers sometimes, because they do think that there’s this possibility of market uncertainty,’ he said.”

“Builders are dealing with their own issues, said Ted Wilson, who leads Dallas-based market research firm Residential Strategies. At the end of March, there were 11,574 finished vacant homes, up 4.3% from year’s end. The rise in unfinished inventory has triggered price discounts and further buyer incentives, cutting builders’ profits. Builders have remained aggressive, continuing to build speculative homes — homes built without a particular buyer in mind. ‘The big difference from 2008 is that if you’re willing to discount, you can usually find a clearing price for houses in every neighborhood,’ Wilson said. ‘I think there are some builders that are saying ‘Okay, we’re gonna have certain neighborhoods where we don’t make any money, but we have others where we are making money. We’ll just lump it all together, and that’s our return.’”

The Denver Post. “With inventory at its highest level since 2011, the Denver metro real estate market is experiencing a significant shift. Active listings last month totaled 14,007, up 3% from May’s 13,599 and 37% from the same month the previous year, when they stood at 10,214. ‘We do not have a bad market; it’s a different market,’ said Amanda Snitker, chair of the DMAR Market Trends Committee. ‘In this new environment, those who stay grounded, informed, and responsive will be the ones who succeed. In 2025, we are all navigating the market we have, not the one we expected. Real-time awareness is the most valuable asset buyers and sellers have.’ Sellers can’t afford to price homes based on last year’s peak values or early 2025 expectations, Snitker said, because buyers are cost-conscious and quick to dismiss unprepared or overpriced listings. More people are leaving Colorado than moving in, with a net outbound migration of nearly 11 for every 10 arrivals.”

The Utah News Dispatch. “Jim Wood, one of the state’s leading housing market experts, paints the latest picture of Utah’s housing market. His big takeaway from last year? Utah’s housing marketplace — for both homebuyers and renters — is seeing a ‘correction’ from the COVID-19 era, when low interest rates and new remote work opportunities sparked a homebuying spree, especially in the West. ‘We’re living in the shadow of that,’ Wood told Utah News Dispatch in an interview, adding that when prices skyrocket more than 40% in two years like they did from 2020 to 2022, some level of correction is ‘inevitable.’ In Utah’s five largest counties — Salt Lake, Weber, Davis, Utah and Washington — housing prices ‘are seriously to severely unaffordable,’ when comparing median sales prices to median household income, Wood wrote in the report.”

“In 2022, the state’s ‘median multiple ratio’ — which measures the severity of housing affordability by dividing the median sales price of a home by median household income — was a record 5.7, or ‘severely unaffordable,’ according to the report. Last year, that dipped slightly to 5.1 after housing price growth leveled off, but a ratio of 5.1 is still considered ‘severely unaffordable.’ Consider that Utah’s median multiple ratio was 3.5 just over 10 years ago, in 2014. That ratio was considered ‘moderately unaffordable.’ ‘Why is employment growth slowing down in Utah? A couple of us here at the institute, we’ve discussed that, and we think it has a lot to do with housing prices,’ he said. Anecdotally, Wood said he personally knows of people who have quit their jobs and moved out of the state in search of lower-priced homes.”

The Bend Bulletin in Oregon. “Just two months ago, Bend’s median home price was the highest recorded in a decade, but in June the median price sunk to the lowest in 16 months, according to a monthly housing report. The price swings in the housing market could be signs of a market in flux, or could just be the effect of a larger inventory of million-dollar-plus homes for sale, said Donnie Montagner, owner of Beacon Appraisal Group of Redmond. ‘The market is giving mixed signals,’ said Montagner. ‘Some Realtors are saying they are busy, others are not. It’s becoming a buyer’s market, but it all depends on the price point.’ In June, the median sales price for a single-family home in Bend was $693,000, a decline of $79,000 from the month before and $139,000 lower than a record high median price set in April, according to the report. In Bend, there’s currently an 11-month supply of homes in the $1 million-plus price category, Montagner said. Moving south, Sunriver’s median sales price of a single-family home in June was $869,000, compared to more than $1 million in May. The amount of inventory in Sunriver in June was nine months, a five-month increase over May’s inventory levels.”

The Tennessee Lookout. “In May Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell wrapped up his 2025 State of Metro address with a call for Nashvillians to ‘give ourselves some more choices about how we move into our future together.’ Let’s grant off the top that political State of The Whatever speeches inevitably amount to ritually upbeat exercises in civic fantasy with a news making shelf life of about an hour. But parking the cynicism for a few minutes (a heavy lift for me) I found myself chewing on hizzoner’s yen for a promising future as I scanned recent news items on the city’s economic trajectory: News that aggressive development of tall gleaming apartment buildings has gifted (some might say saddled) the city center with a large inventory (some might say glut) of unrented tall-gleaming-apartment-building apartments, with vacancies said to number in the thousands.”

“Taken together the picture these and similar dispatches paint is a paradoxical one: a city that manages to be simultaneously vibrant and stagnant. There’s a lot going on, yet it somehow feels like Nashville is running in place. Taken to extremes, more-is-better means a shortage of forward-looking adults in the room ready to tap the brakes when the thing spins out. That spin has produced for us the opposite of world class: a city center that is principally a lucrative theme park of intoxication in which corporate operators profit off synthetic music celebrity branding, culinary mediocrity, and exploitation of talented musicians hustling for a subsistence living as country-rock human jukeboxes. It is also a downtown that many Nashvillians want little to do with. The same apparently can be said about business.”

Universal Hub in Massachusetts. “Banker & Tradesman reports that an auctioneer has scheduled a foreclosure sale next month for the half-acre on Charlesgate West where a British developer had won approval – and even a change in city ordinances – for a 28-story, 400-unit apartment tower with 68 affordable units. Scape, which initially entered the Boston market hoping to build large private dorms for area colleges, then realized how much everybody hated that idea, spent nearly six years working on its Charlesgate proposal – which it first proposed as a smaller 200-unit complex before filing plans for its tower. Last November, the City Council approved an amendment to the ordinance to allow the building after Councilor Sharon Durkan, who represents the Fenway, argued the November election results meant Boston had to do everything it could to remain welcoming to LGBTQ and other people who might flock here in the face of oppression in other states.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Norm Li had to lay off 75 per cent of his staff at his eponymous company that makes renderings and other visual content for real estate developers as the Canadian residential development industry faces the worst downturn since the 1990s recession. Mr. Li, who has been running his business since the early 2000s, said he watched as more developers put projects on hold, cancelled them or were forced into receivership. And then his company’s work dried up. ‘I tried to hold on for a long time and I tried to keep it all together, but then one day, I saw it. I knew if I don’t lay these people off today, the next payroll, the bank is going to come shut me down,’ he said. He described the layoffs as ‘Sophie’s choice,’ referring to the movie where a mother has to choose which one of her children would survive. Mr. Li is not alone. There have been job cuts across the industry as the sector’s slowdown enters its fourth year.”

“In Toronto, the country’s largest real estate market, the decline has been the most pronounced. In other Ontario regions such as Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton, the annualized preconstruction condo sales for the six months ended in March were about 80 per cent lower than the 2020 to 2024 annual average, according to Altus Group. Ottawa’s annualized sales were 70 per cent below that 2020-2024 average while Montreal, Edmonton, Vancouver and Calgary were down between 62.5 per cent to 50 per cent, according to Altus. ‘The reality is that the market has changed. The sales are not there,’ said Cara Hirsch, whose Toronto-based company is operating with half the sales team it once had during the pandemic’s real estate frenzy. ‘Everyone in the development space is getting hit,’ she said.”

The Standard in the UK. “In parts of London, the scale of the discounts on offer is breathtaking. In January it emerged that The Holme, a sprawling Regent’s Park mansion, sold for £138.9 million, against an original asking price of £250 million, after two years on the market. And The Holme appears to be the rule rather than the exception. Chaotic is the word Becky Munday, managing director of Mundays Estate Agents, which sells across south and south-east London, uses to describe the current market. ‘You have got a lot of landlords selling up, neighbours undercutting each other, people finding their dream home and slashing prices,’ she said. ‘It can get very emotional.'”

“In Herne Hill, Sarah Dirilen, head of sales at John D Wood estate agents, feels her vendors’ pain. She recently sold her three-bedroom South Norwood semi to upsize to Beckenham. ‘I bought it in 2018, did the renovation, and spent a decent amount of money,’ she said. ‘When I came to resell it I made a loss. People have got used to the idea that they will make money when they sell, but that is not always the case.’ Not all of Dirilen’s vendors are quite as pragmatic as she is, however and don’t take kindly to the idea of cutting their asking prices. ‘It is about managing expectations of people who live in a city that has seen massive price growth in the past,’ she said. ‘But that has not been the case over the past three or four years. I tell them that if their home is not selling at the current price — and we have done everything possible to market the property — then it was never worth that in the first place.'”

“After spending eight years in her one-bedroom flat in Holloway, by last summer Rebecca Barnes was ready for a more peaceful home in the suburbs. When she put the freehold flat with its large roof terrace on the market in August 2024, Barnes, a writer and editor, decided on an asking price of £410,000. ‘I had three valuations and this wasn’t the highest,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be realistic and sell quickly.’ After a handful of viewings and no offers Barnes decided to swap agents and drop her asking price to £400,000. This generated more viewings, but no crucial offer. After a month Barnes’s agents advised her to knock another £50,000 off the asking price, assuring her that the move would spark a bidding war. In January 2025 she accepted a £347,699 offer. The deal went through on March 31.”

“‘In hindsight I am still irritated with the agent for forcing my hand as they knew it would get them a sale,’ she said. ‘However, I wanted and needed to move by that point, so I was OK with selling for the price I did. I have absolutely no regrets, as I’m very happy where I am. I’ve made good money on previous properties and you can’t win them all.'”