Remember how home buyers were paying way over asking price just a few months ago?
Yeah apparently it's not like that so much anymore:
Home sellers are doing way more to entice homebuyers these days, according to data from Redfin published Thursday morning. ...
During the pandemic real estate frenzy, sellers held all the cards and desperate buyers did whatever they could to close a deal — waiving the inspection, paying way over asking, etc.
Now, it's homebuyers who must be wooed.
It's no joke. Here's Redfin's data:
Home sellers gave concessions to buyers in 41.9% of home sales in the fourth quarter — the highest share of any three-month period in Redfin's records, which date back to July 2020. That's up from just over 30% in both the previous quarter and the fourth quarter of 2021, and outpaces the prior 40.8% high from the three months ending July 2020, when the housing market nearly ground to a halt due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. ...
"Buyers are asking sellers for things that were unheard of during the past few years," said Van Welborn, a Redfin real estate agent in Phoenix. "They're feeling empowered, partly because their offer is often the only one, and partly because they know sellers have built up so much equity during the pandemic that they can afford to dole out sizable concessions."
Buyers the last two years:
Buyers now:
The region-level data is even starker:
In Phoenix, sellers gave concessions to buyers in 62.9% of home sales in the fourth quarter, up from 33.2% a year earlier. That 29.7-percentage-point increase is the largest among the 25 U.S. metropolitan areas for which data was available. Next came Seattle (25.6 ppts), Las Vegas (22.2 ppts), San Diego (20.7 ppts) and Detroit (20.4 ppts). ...
"It took a while, but seller expectations are coming back down to earth. Concessions were common before the pandemic, and we may be returning to that norm," Welborn said. "Sellers realize they're not going to get $80,000 over the asking price like their neighbor did last year."
