The U.S. housing market feels strangely upside-down right now. On paper, it’s the strongest buyer’s market in more than a decade—yet millions of would-be buyers are sitting on the sidelines because they simply can’t afford to join the game. According to a new Redfin analysis, October saw an estimated 36.8% more home sellers than buyers across the country, which translates to roughly 528,769 extra sellers with nowhere to go. It’s the widest gap since records began in 2013, and the data signals a structural shift rather than another temporary wobble.
Redfin uses a fairly straightforward definition: if a market has more than 10% more sellers than buyers, it becomes a buyer’s market. By that measure, the shift happened back in May 2024. What’s different now is the scale—since April 2025, the imbalance has surpassed 30%, and economists say the last time the tables tilted this far was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. The irony is almost poetic: buyers are theoretically in charge, but the cohort with actual purchasing power has never been smaller. Costs have climbed so steeply that affordability itself is the barrier—not supply, not availability.
Real estate agents on the ground describe the atmosphere as tense but tired. Matt Purdy, a Redfin Premier agent in Denver, put it bluntly: buyers want low payments, sellers want to recover years of price appreciation, and emotion—reluctance, disbelief, frustration—is playing a bigger role than spreadsheets. Some sellers are watching their listings collect dust for months. Others give up and delist when nearby homes close below asking price. Negotiations often tilt toward buyers simply because they have alternatives. Choice is leverage.
The psychological shift lines up with another telling data point: buyer activity fell 1.7% month-over-month in October, dropping to 1.44 million active buyers—the second-lowest level ever recorded, just above April 2020, when the pandemic froze everything. Sellers are reducing activity too, but more slowly. Their numbers declined just 0.5%, landing at 1.97 million—still enough to sustain a stubborn oversupply relative to interested buyers.
The imbalance isn’t uniform. It’s regional, and in some places almost dramatic. San Antonio leads with 117% more sellers than buyers, followed closely by Austin, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Nashville—all metros where pandemic-era migration and massive construction booms inflated supply long after demand cooled. The Sun Belt, which became a magnet during remote-work fever, is now overbuilt relative to local purchasing power and complicated further by soaring insurance costs and extreme-weather risk, especially in Florida. Meanwhile, six metros sit firmly in seller-market territory—places like Nassau County, Newark, and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania—where tight supply and limited new construction give sellers the upper hand and where home prices have risen an average of 7.1% year-over-year, far outpacing markets where buyers currently dictate terms.
A fascinating footnote: San Francisco—a market once synonymous with bidding wars and absurd price escalation—has softened into a balanced zone after months in buyer-market territory. For two consecutive months, estimated buyers and sellers have been almost perfectly matched. Five years ago, the idea would have felt surreal.
San Francisco Real Estate Market: People still love San Francisco — its innovation, art, food, scenery, and soul are unmatched. But love isn’t always enough to close a sale. Until the city finds a sustainable way to address homelessness and public space safety, the real estate market will continue to operate with an invisible but powerful psychological tax: hesitation.
Behind the shifts sit forces that feel both cyclical and structural: high mortgage rates, elevated home prices, inflation pressure, fading pandemic migration trends, and a generational affordability crisis that hits first-time buyers hardest. The supply-and-demand math increasingly favors the buyer, yet the wallet reality favors no one. It’s a buyer’s market locked behind a financial checkpoint.
Maybe this moment ends up being a transition point—like the pause before a pendulum swings again. Or maybe it marks the beginning of a rebalanced housing era, where markets finally slow down from the chaos of the last five years. Hard to say. But the numbers are rewriting the tone of the market, and for the first time in a long time, the question isn’t Can I find a house? but Can I afford the one I actually have the power to negotiate for?
