The housing market is still largely frozen, and sellers don’t seem to be in any rush to help it thaw.
More than 84,000 home sellers yanked their homes off the market in September, according to a new report from Redfin. That marks a 28% increase from the number of homes that were delisted the prior year, and the highest pace of pulled listings in any September in eight years, the real estate listings site said.
The firm said it counted a home as “delisted” if a listing was pulled from the market for at least 31 days without a sale or a pending sale.
Delistings, which tend to surge in the winter months, appear to be rising due to continued weak demand from buyers, many of whom have been sidelined from the housing market in recent years due to affordability concerns and high mortgage rates.
But sellers seem unwilling to dial down their asking price, even as bidders dry up, according to Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin.
The average home that was delisted in September was on the market for around 100 days, according to Redfin’s analysis.
The percentage of home listings in the US that were considered “stale,” or on the market for at least 60 days without a pending sale, also clocked in at 70% in September, the firm said.
“More sellers are giving up because their homes have been sitting on the market for a long time, and they don’t want to or can’t afford to settle on accepting a low price,” Khan wrote in a statement.
Home prices are still hovering near record highs, but are starting to cool as activity in the housing market wanes. The median sale price of a home in the US dropped to $410,800 in the second quarter, according to the Census Bureau.
Nationwide, home values ticked up 1.3% year-over-year in September, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index, the slowest pace of growth recorded in about two years.
