Pending home sales in the U.S. last month fell to their lowest level in at least more than a decade.
Residential deals tend to drop in the winter months, but the past few Decembers have been particularly lackluster, according to data from Redfin. But December 2025’s total fell about 6.5 percent year over year, with only 329,000 deals entering contract — the lowest since at least 2012, the earliest of Redfin’s data.
As of Jan. 22, the average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage rate was 6.09 percent — the lowest since late 2024 — and there was a 1.7 percent increase in homes sold across the country last month. Though borrowing costs are dropping and the growth of home prices is slowing, broader economic conditions continue to make it tough for some buyers to ink deals. The number of new listings to come online also fell by almost 6 percent, hitting a three-year low in December.
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Six of the 10 most populous metropolitan regions saw the number of pending home sales fall in December compared to the year before, according to a TRD Data analysis of Redfin data. However, the market with the greatest year-over-year drop was Houston, where pending deals plunged nearly 12 percent.
Meanwhile, the market that recorded the greatest yearly increase was the Phoenix metro area, where deals rose by more than 3 percent.
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Both Phoenix and Houston have high levels of supply, but Houston still dwarfs the Arizona state capital: Houston in December had nearly 30,000 homes on the market compared to Phoenix’s more than 21,000.
Phoenix represents an outlier among the country’s top markets, as it experienced not only a rise in pending deals year over year, but also a 13 percent surge in homes sold and a 1 percent uptick in its median home price over the same time period, according to TRD’s analysis. No other market had all three metrics in the green last month.