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Buyers are in luck in most U.S. housing markets. drazenphoto/Envato

It’s now the strongest buyer's market on record, says Redfin — driven by sellers flooding the market in 10 Sun Belt cities

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The rest of the country is heading the same way. Sellers outnumbered buyers by 57.9% nationwide last month, Redfin said in a report published Sept. 10, up from 52.1% in July. Those two months are the strongest buyer’s markets Redfin has ever recorded, and the 10 strongest metro-level buyer’s markets are all in the Sun Belt, four of them in Texas.

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Many more sellers and hardly any new buyers

Redfin counted the number of people trying to sell a home nationwide at an estimated 1,534,918 in August, a 3.9% rise from July. That’s the biggest monthly jump in Redfin’s records, and the most sellers on the market since early 2020.

Buyers, on the other hand, came in at an estimated 972,300 — up just 0.1% from July, which had the fewest buyers Redfin has ever counted.

To count as a buyer’s market by Redfin’s definition, a metro needs more than 10% more sellers than buyers; a seller’s market is the reverse. By that yardstick, 36 of the 49 metros Redfin analyzed were buyer’s markets in August. (Redfin looked at the 50 biggest metros and left out Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because it didn’t have enough data.)

After Nashville, the widest gaps are in Miami (138%), Houston (131%), Orlando, Florida (122%), Las Vegas (117%), San Antonio (116%), Austin, Texas (115%) and Dallas (108%). Atlanta and Phoenix fill out the top 10. Houston, Orlando, Las Vegas and Dallas all set their own records in August, same as Nashville.

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Builders keep delivering homes buyers can’t afford

Part of this is supply: builders have been unusually busy in Nashville, Texas and Florida, Redfin said, and their finished houses keep arriving for sale even as fewer people shop for them.

The other part is that plenty of people who want a house can’t make the monthly payment work. Freddie Mac put the average 30-year fixed rate at 6.76% for the week ending Sept. 10, up from 6.35% a year ago. Miami buyers also face rising insurance bills, growing HOA charges and climate risk, Redfin said.

Redfin senior economist Asad Khan said in the release that “Today’s house hunters can afford to be choosy.”

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Redfin adds a warning, though: None of this helps someone who can’t afford to buy at all. And buyers are thin on the ground in the first place because steep housing costs and a shaky economy pushed so many of them out over the past few years.

Even so, the gap kept widening in 22 buyer’s markets from July to August. Orlando went from 100% more sellers than buyers to 122%, and Seattle from 55% to 72%. Buyers did lose a little ground in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the gap fell from 81% to 65%, and in Miami, which was all the way up at 149% in July.

Buyers can push, sellers have to price to sell

Khan said buyers in most markets have room to push back on the asking price, and to ask the seller to cover repairs or pick up part of the closing costs. One caution from him: If a house is attractive and already sensibly priced, the seller may not give an inch. But nobody should feel pushed into a deal they’re unsure about, he said.

Sellers get the reverse advice: Find out what rival houses are going for, get the place ready to show, and expect some back-and-forth over the offer, Khan said. And whoever wants a quick sale should start with a realistic asking price, because buyers have so many other listings to pick through.

None of this applies in the five metros that still favor sellers. Nassau County, New York, had 28% fewer sellers than buyers in August, followed by Newark, New Jersey (21% fewer), Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (20%), Milwaukee (18%) — which also made Zillow’s list of 2026’s hottest housing markets — and San Francisco (12%). San Francisco has made that list only twice in four years, in June and again in August, and Redfin chalks that up to money from the AI boom. These are also mostly places where little new housing has gone up for years, Redfin said, and prices across the five rose an average of 5.5% from a year earlier in August, as compared to 1.6% across the buyer’s markets.

Back in Nashville, where the gap is widest, Redfin agent Kristin Sanchez said houses are lingering long enough that nobody has to rush, and a lot of sellers there are open to negotiating the price and other terms of the sale.

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Godwin Oluponmile Contributor

Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.

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