Your seller has read the headline. Buyers have the upper hand, asking prices are at a one-year low, bidding wars are over.
All of that is true. It is also, mostly, about Austin.
What the national numbers actually say
Redfin's read on the first week of August is that buyers have negotiating power across most of the country, bidding wars are unlikely and concessions are back on the table. The median housing payment fell to $2,575, its lowest in three months, and it fell because sellers dropped their asking prices to the lowest level in a year. Pending sales hit their lowest point since early April. One of their Nashville agents said sellers "need to pack their patience."
Add the wider picture we looked at a fortnight ago. The country lost 23,000 jobs in July against expectations of adding 83,000, another 103,000 were quietly revised out of May and June, and labour force participation is at its lowest since February 2021.
So nobody should be relaxed. But look at what is happening here before you price like you are in Tennessee.
The corridor is not that market
Bright MLS reported for June that closed sales across the Philadelphia metro ran 4.0% ahead of last year, and new pending sales were up 6.9%. Inventory is building, and it is building from an extraordinarily low base: still only about 53% of 2019 levels.
Local brokerages reading the same data have listings up roughly ten percent year over year and median days on market moving from sixteen to nineteen. Nineteen days. In a market everyone is describing as slow.
That is not a buyer's market. It is a market with slightly more choice in it than there was, which is a completely different thing, and if you price a Cherry Hill semi as though it were an Austin new-build you will leave money on the table and you will deserve to.
The bit nobody says out loud
The thing I have been wrong about, publicly, more than once in my career is assuming the general condition applies to the specific case. It is a comfortable error because it always sounds informed.
Years ago I told my co-founder not to sign a client. Too big, too early, would bend the roadmap out of shape. He signed them anyway and they became the backbone of the company. I stood up in front of the team afterwards and walked them through my own reasoning error, line by line, because the alternative was everybody quietly deciding my judgement was a fixed quantity.
That is the move here too. If you told a seller in March that they would have three offers by June and they have none, the worst available option is to say nothing and hope the price cut does the talking. Go back, say what you got wrong and why, and say what you would do now. You will keep the listing and you will keep the next one.
Five things I would actually do
1. Fix exposure before you touch price
Price is the most expensive lever on the board and everybody reaches for it first because it is the only one that requires no work. Before it moves, ask an unglamorous question: how many people who could actually buy this house have genuinely seen it? Not impressions. Seen it. If the answer is thin, you have a marketing problem being solved with the seller's money.
2. Make the price improvement an event, not an admin task
Something like four in ten listings nationally take a reduction. In most offices that is a phone call, somebody editing a field, and a new photo if anyone remembers. It should trip a sequence the same hour: new creative out, budget re-weighted, the improved-price campaign live, the old advert stopped. A reduction that nobody is told about is just less money.
3. Use "coming soon" properly
Redfin surveyed a thousand homeowners in April and found 83% were interested in a coming-soon approach, and 84% said more certainty their home would sell would make them likelier to list at all. That is not a gimmick, that is your inventory problem talking. A pre-market window lets a seller test a price without spending days on market to find out, and days on market is the one asset in a listing that only ever depletes.
4. Treat a delisting as your failure, not the market's
Sellers pulled listings at near-record rates this spring, around 5.8% of them. Every one of those is a seller who concluded that being on the market was worse than not being on it. Almost always that conclusion was formed in the absence of information, which is a communication failure with a name on it.
5. Count closings, not leads
In a softening market cost per lead can hold perfectly steady while cost per closing quietly doubles, and only one of those numbers determines whether you can afford next year. I have said this before and I will keep saying it.
Any road up
There is a version of this business where you read the national headline, panic slightly, and pass the panic to your seller with a recommendation attached. It is very easy and it is why so many good listings get cut twice when they needed to be photographed once.
Closed sales up four percent. Pendings up nearly seven. Inventory at barely half of 2019. Nineteen days.
Go and look at your own patch before you borrow somebody else's weather. And if the numbers here do turn, you will find out from your own pipeline a good month before you find out from a headline about Nashville.