To talk about the residential market is to picture the nation on a teeter totter.
Supply and demand has gone lopsided, as southern markets flipped from sellers’ playgrounds to buyers’ havens. Northeastern and Midwestern cities are on the other side of the seesaw.
The lopsidedness began in 2020. Cities were empty, interest rates low and the housing market ripping. No place felt the Covid home-buying boom more than the Sun Belt. Affluent urbanites, no longer confined by their commutes, traded cramped condos for new single-family homes and condo towers, which had been in the works since before the pandemic but were now more desirable in a work-from-home world.
In 2021, the Sun Belt accounted for 44 percent of all home sales. Prices in cities like Austin and Miami skyrocketed over 40 percent by mid-2022. Developers and homeowners across the bottom half of the U.S. basked in the historic seller’s market, watching home values appreciate.
Four years later, the country looks remarkably different. Year over year, inventory is up in almost all major markets. In places with buyer demand, that’s good news for brokers. But in the former boomtowns, listings pile up.
High mortgage rates have stifled demand. But there’s an even broader inertia behind the shift. Compass chief economist Mike Simonsen calls it “The Great Stay.”
“We’re staying in our house, we’re staying in our town, we’re staying in our jobs longer,” he said. “It’s not just real estate, but it’s intertwined with other macro things going on.”
When people stay put, inventory stays low, and existing home sales across the country have been down roughly 15 percent the past three years, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.
But not all regional housing markets have reacted the same way to the situation.
The stratification has broken down geographically. Extreme buyer’s markets dot the South and Southwest and the Northeast and Midwest are home to a swath of seller’s markets. This follows the lines of housing built during the pandemic, according to Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather.
“The places that built the most housing now have more homes for sale than buyers looking to buy them by a large margin,” she said. Midwest and post-industrial Northeast cities “did not build very much during the pandemic, and they didn’t really see that much value growth during the pandemic either.”
That means demand is high and supply historically low in states like New Jersey and Ohio, which have some of the most competitive markets in the country. But while brokers have wished for more inventory over the past few years, in the places where supply is finally high — Texas and Florida — there are price cuts and concessions.
“You can basically draw a line, like this is where we build houses in the US,” Simonsen said.
The Real Deal spoke to agents in regions to go deep on the trends: supply constraints in the Northeast, underpricing in the Midwest and overbuilding in Texas and the Sun Belt.
New Jersey
If you’re a lover of straight lines, check out the graph of the median home price in New Jersey. Though its proximity to New York City is part of its story of high demand, it offers a clearer picture of a Northeastern buyer’s market than the Big Apple, where the ceaseless need for ultra-luxury makes generalizations about the market difficult.
Unlike the boomtowns in South Florida or near Austin, where prices soared mid- 2022, home prices in New Jersey have risen steadily since 2020 and continued to do so this year; they’re up 27 percent since 2022, according to data from Redfin. That’s the second-largest increase in the whole country.
Meanwhile, the median days on market in May of this year was 36, down from three years ago — a period when buyers and sellers around the country were famously rushing to close deals.
The state, like many of its Northern counterparts, doesn’t have to contend with a sizable condo market inflating available inventory, according to Christie’s International Real Estate’s Taylor Lucyk.
Back in 2022, when homes came on the market, it was often because sellers were eyeing warmer pastures. But Florida in particular has lost its shine as a destination for Garden Staters.
“There are less people, at least in my market, that are rushing to go to Florida,” said Lucyk. “The pricing in Florida has become so high, it’s basically unaffordable for a lot of people.”
That has left the typical buyer pool — New Jerseyans returning home or city-dwellers looking to upsize — fighting over less inventory. In Bergen County this year, homes have sold for 4 percent above their list price, on average, as a result, according to Lucyk.
The luxury market here distills the trends. In the past two years, 25 homes have traded for $10 million or above, more than double what the state used to average in a given year, according to Lucyk. And those homes have spent less time on the market than ever.
“Previously [it] could be three to five years before something like that actually strikes and trades,” he said. “That three-year timeline, five-year timeline, has been brought down to a year, year and a half.”
Cleveland
Sharon Gay Phelps, a broker at Howard Hanna, was in the car on the way to a $300,000 condo outside the city. Her buyer had just sold a townhome in Cleveland’s historic district for more $1.2 million and was looking to downsize. This is the kind of typical life change that makes markets hum, but it’s been less and less common in Cleveland in recent years.
Transaction count in the metro peaked in May 2022 and has been down ever since, as would-be sellers face high home prices and mortgage rates that make it a challenge to justify a move. Empty nesters, for example, are “looking at trading their house that’s worth, say, $600,000 that’s 3,000 square feet for 1,700 square feet, that’s also $600,000, so it just doesn’t make sense to them,” said Keller Williams Living’s Drew Gaebelein.
Like most of the post-industrial cities in its cohort, Cleveland runs on single-family resales — a common thread for the areas around the country that have only tightened up in the last few years after being hit hard during the Great Recession.
“Our inventory was low even prior to the pandemic,” Gaebelein said.
In the middle of 2019, the metro area was already down to under three months of supply, according to data from Redfin, and that fell even further during the pandemic. Though prices are low, price growth is higher and days on market shorter than other major metros, thanks to the lack of supply.
Developers have found success building outside the city, where townhomes in planned communities accommodate some of the pent-up demand.
“They will have a section specifically for attached townhomes and then the single families, and they’re doing that to fit more people in, because the demand is there,” Gaebelein said.
Chicago
Chicago, which emptied out during the pandemic, has its issues — a downtown still recovering, old condos that are a mismatch with buyers who want newer amenities. But the bottom line is that the city is a solid seller’s market, thanks to low levels of desirable inventory.
In August, the number of homes on the market in Chicago was still less than half that from pre-pandemic, the second-most severe drop in the country, according to a Realtor.com report.
That low inventory means homes are selling fast, and sellers have some leverage to command higher prices. But because of high mortgage rates that limit buyers’ purchasing power, the lack of supply hasn’t driven prices so high as to make the area seem unaffordable.
“That’s just the Midwest,” Compass broker Jeff Lowe said. “Markets go up a little bit, they go down a little bit. No one gets rich off their homes in Chicago, but they don’t lose their asses either.”
Lowe seems to expect more balance, he said, rather than predicting a swing firmly towards buyers or sellers.
“I think we’re just trending towards a more even market, where buyers and sellers, it’s a little more even playing field,” he said.
— Caleb McCullough
Austin
The rising tide of the early 2020s lifted many boats. Austin, briefly christened “Silicon Hills,” enjoyed the additional boost of a tech wave. As major companies installed headquarters or outposts, the rate of price increase turned vertical in 2021, aided by city policies that kept something of a lid on supply, though plenty of multifamily got built, as did single-family, especially in nearby counties. The average home jumped 30 percent in value that year, according to the Dallas Fed. Median sale price per square foot peaked at almost $300 in May 2022, according to Redfin.
Today, it looks like Austin’s run aground. Year-over-year price changes have been negative since the third quarter of 2022; in the second quarter of 2025, the price index of the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos area was 3 percent lower year-over-year, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center.
Austin had the third-highest seller-to-buyer ratio in America this summer, according to Redfin, which registered 18,202 sellers to 8,134 buyers in Austin in July. Local agents report that the luxury submarket, especially condos, is particularly suffering.
“There’s enough inventory at this point to put us strongly in a buyer’s market everywhere,” Mike Ray, head of Keller Williams Austin, said.
Dallas, whose diverse economy may have protected it from as dramatic a plunge as Austin, has also made a turn into buyer’s market territory.
— Isaiah Mitchell
Tampa
Cities on the Gulf Coast of Florida were major beneficiaries of the pandemic moving trends: lots of demand and enormous price growth.
Which meant there was farther to fall. Now, in Tampa, a run-up in supply has led to lower asking prices. But instead of sparking movement in the market, a mismatch between what buyers will pay for homes and what sellers will accept has proven to be a drag. From spring 2022 to August 2025, the median home has gone from spending just seven days on the market to 55, according to data from Redfin.
The biggest problem is expensive maintenance.
At Bayfront Towers, an older luxury condo building in St. Petersburg, Florida, six of seven condos listed for sale by the end of August had undergone a price cut.
Two years ago, a state-mandated inspection found the towers likely need $45 million in repairs. The inspection happened because of new rules put in place following the Surfside condo collapse in 2021.
Facing potential assessments in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, condo owners have stuck up virtual “For Sale” signs in droves.
“[The increased dues are] something that people are having to look at and say, ‘Okay, does it even make sense to stay or should we go?’” Corcoran Dwelling’s Liane Jamason said. The assessments have come along with rising insurance premiums around the state, making the cost of living prohibitively expensive for owners — and any potential buyers.
“It’s a little bit of a standoff between buyers and sellers right now, because the buyers think, ‘Oh, interest rates are too high, insurance is too high, I can lowball this,’ and sellers are like, ‘We’ve already come down, we’re not coming down anymore,’” Jamason said.
Miami
In South Florida, home and condo sales are declining, and price growth has been languishing. Buyers have choices.
But it’s not a free-for-all buyer’s market, brokers say. The fundamentals are still strong: South Florida remains the destination for East Coasters looking to trade in the frigid winters and high taxes for, well, no winters or state income tax.
The pandemic didn’t change people’s destination, it just gave them a reason to pack up early. It “really sped up people’s decisions to move to Florida,” Keyes Company president Christina Pappas said. “People who would have maybe made those decisions in ’23, ’24 and ’25, they made them in 2020 and so we ate into future inventory and we ate into future equity,” she said.
She’s seen the fall back to earth in the last few years as a regression to the mean. “When people say, ‘Oh, it looks like Miami has slowed, or it looks like the Southeast has slowed,’ it’s really just a digestion of the immense amount of growth we had in a two year time frame,” she said.
Pappas sees the condo selloff in South Florida, where almost 90 percent of the units are 30 years or older and face increased carrying costs, as simply the inverse of what happened during Covid, and one that in a few years will also similarly course correct.
“I actually think it’s a really great time to make investments in buildings that are making the right decisions,” she said.