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Despite home sale prices reaching an all-time high last year, many of the nation’s leading markets experienced a shift in dealmaking power, with buyers increasingly taking the upper hand.
The Sun Belt had some of the strongest buyer’s markets among the country’s top 50 metropolitan areas in December, with Austin, Texas, ranking as the top buyer’s market last month, according to research by Redfin.
Redfin defines a buyer’s market when sellers outnumber buyers by more than 10 percent. The company defines a seller’s market when buyers outnumber sellers by more than 10 percent. If this gap is less than 10 percent, Redfin calls the market balanced. Redfin determines the number of sellers in a market based on active listings. It determines buyers using a formula involving the time it takes a buyer to tour a property to close on its purchase.
Using these distinctions, the U.S. has been in a buyer’s market since May 2024. But in December, the imbalance hit a record, as there were 47.1 percent more sellers than buyers.
Here is a closer look at some of the top regions Redfin analyzed.
Texas
The Lone Star State’s top cities have long experienced a population and development boom that in recent years began cooling — and it doesn’t appear to be slowing soon. In Austin, Texas’ capital city, there are more than 128 percent more sellers than buyers. Home prices in the market also have risen year over year, by about 2 percent, to $431,000 in December. San Antonio, Houston and Dallas also made the top 10 buyer’s markets in the country. The lowest-ranking Texan metro was Fort Worth, where the gap between sellers and buyers was about 67 percent.
Florida
Three major South Florida metros — Fort Lauderdale, Miami and West Palm Beach — rank solidly within the top 10 buyer’s markets in the country. In second-place Fort Lauderdale and fourth-place Miami, there are more than double the number of sellers than buyers, and the time that homes are lingering on the market has crept up over the year. Brokers in South Florida have observed a decided split: high-end properties are flying off the market, but lower-priced homes are taking longer to sell.
New York
The Big Apple’s market in December was considered balanced, as buyers outnumbered sellers by just 2.4 percent. New York City is in the midst of an inventory crisis, particularly as the pipeline for newly developed condos is drying up, and the median sale price has ticked up over the year. Meanwhile, three other New York-area cities — New Brunswick, New Jersey; Newark, New Jersey; and Nassau County, New York — had solid seller’s markets. Nassau County had the strongest seller’s market of the top 50 metros, as buyers outnumbered sellers there by more than 33 percent. About half of buyers in the county in December paid above asking to lock down properties, almost double the national share of about 22 percent.