People keep asking me the same question: where did all of the buyers go? It keeps getting worse every week. Sellers now outnumber buyers by 63%, the biggest gap in Redfin's records, and the math of buying a home makes less sense than ever compared with renting. Here is the data, nationally and in Florida, and what it means if you are buying or selling in the next six months.
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Jon Brooks on the widening gap between home sellers and buyers, published November 4, 2026. The full written version and transcript are below.
Sellers now outnumber buyers by 63%
Redfin's September 2026 count, published October 14, found about 1.51 million home sellers and about 929,000 buyers nationwide. That is a 62.6% surplus of sellers, the biggest gap in Redfin's records going back to 2013, and the buyer count is the lowest in those records. More homes keep coming on the market while fewer buyers show up, and the gap keeps spreading. In Jacksonville, Redfin counted 80% more sellers than buyers.
Prices are falling in more cities, not just Florida and Texas
For the last few years the conversation was, "Oh, it's just Florida, it's just Texas." Those were the markets that overbuilt because builders assumed the pandemic demand would last. That is no longer the whole story. Prices are now falling in five big cities, and the red on the map is spreading: Seattle is down about 2%, and you are seeing declines in Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, Tampa, Portland, Phoenix and Atlanta. Chicago is still up.
The markets doing fine are the ones that never had the construction boom. We never had a housing shortage. We had a temporary demand shock in specific areas, mostly in the Sun Belt, and builders reacted by building a massive amount of multifamily and single-family homes. Then the demand dried up. I cite a 93% decline in net migration to Florida from the peak. The Northeast never had that boom, so this is a tale of two markets. I expect national prices could actually end up negative for the year, especially once you count the incentives builders and sellers are giving as they compete for a limited pool of buyers.
Half of sellers are cutting prices in six states
Sellers are responding across the board. In the Parcl Labs data I show, about half of listings have taken a price cut in six states, including Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Texas, with the Carolinas close behind, and about 44.9% overall. Those numbers keep moving up as listings stack up.
We will find out who the truly motivated sellers are versus the ones who "rage quit": they cannot get the price they want, so they pull the house off the market and hope next year is better. At least 10% of listings have done this, and it does not work. Everyone can see the listing history online, including what you were asking before.
Foreclosures are at the highest level since 2019
ICE reported about 303,000 homes in active foreclosure at the end of September, up roughly 37% from a year earlier and the highest level since early 2019. Part of that is a backlog from the 2020 to 2025 forbearance and workout programs, which pushed missed payments to the end of the loan.
I do not think this is a foreclosure crisis. The overall foreclosure rate is still low, and we will not have a crisis until we see real job loss. Even then it takes one to three years, especially in judicial states. What we will have is a backlog reaching the market over the next few years.
Mortgage rates are the number one factor
Rates ripped up to around 7.5% to 7.6% this fall. Freddie Mac's average 30-year fixed rate was 7.24% on October 29, 2026, down from 7.32% the week before but up from 6.17% a year earlier. The Fed raised rates in September and held in October, and markets expect more hikes depending on the data. Mortgage rates are the primary determinant of what you can afford, and most people cannot afford much at 7%, or even 6%.
So buyers are looking for lower payments. They are going to new construction, where the deals are, and they are dabbling in adjustable-rate mortgages again. The MBA reported an ARM share of 11.3% of applications in late October, and 11.4% in its November 4 report, the highest since September 2025. I think that is a big mistake for a lot of buyers: you take on a lot of risk at the peak of the market in most areas. This is the financial engineering you see at the end of a cycle. If you are strapped for cash, do not mess around with it.
Goldman Sachs has a forecast, as I cite it, of mortgage rates around 6.4% by late 2027, possibly as oil prices ease and inflation comes down. We will see. If rates stay elevated, the market slows more. If they come down, buyers come off the sidelines, because we live in a payment economy, and that would slow the declines.
Payments up 97%, incomes up 33%
This is where the disconnect came from. According to John Burns Research and Consulting data I show, mortgage payments are up 97% since 2020 while incomes are up only 33%. Zero rates during the pandemic fueled a speculative jump in prices, and prices are not falling fast enough to offset higher rates. When you see a disconnect like this, you usually see mean reversion. It does not happen overnight, because real estate is an illiquid asset, but it does happen.
That is why mortgage purchase demand is near 30-year lows. The MBA purchase index was 134.1 for the week ending October 23, and purchase applications are down about 18% to 19% from a year earlier. The mortgage business is in a severe recession.
The lock-in effect keeps sellers stuck
Existing owners are paying about 4.4% on their loans on average, while a new loan costs 7.24%. Nobody wants to sell, give up a 4.4% rate and buy again at 7.24%, so a lot of people sit still. That is why transaction volume has dropped. Unless a life event forces a move, it is a math problem, and the math is hard.
It also shows up in who owns. The Census Bureau's third-quarter 2026 survey put homeownership at 79.1% for householders 65 and over versus 36.6% for householders under 35. The math is broken for first-time buyers, and I think that has big long-term implications for the economy.
Inventory just passed 2019 levels
Earlier this year everyone said it would be a great year. In July that changed as mortgage rates moved up. There are now about 5% more homes on the market than last year, and more than in 2019, and the trend is heading the wrong way into year-end. Sellers who normally pull their homes for the holidays are leaving them on the market. Open houses sit empty, and the answer is usually price. The demand is there. People want to be homeowners. They are waiting for the math to make sense.
Some markets have a real glut. Nick Gerli's data shows Seattle listings up 173% in just three years. We saw something similar in Florida and Texas.
1 in 15 sellers is asking less than they paid
This is where distress shows up. In the data I show, about 6.7% of U.S. homes for sale are listed below the owner's purchase price, roughly 1 in 15. Colorado Springs leads at 17.2%, Denver is at 15.7%, and Hawaii, San Francisco, Lakeland and Punta Gorda are on the list. Those are probably owners who bought at the peak. 2022 and 2023 will likely go down as some of the worst years to buy as this correction plays out. That is before round-trip transaction costs of up to 8% and concessions.
Investors are selling and accidental landlords are multiplying
Investors now make up 16.6% of homes for sale in the data I cite, up from 12% in February. A mortgage is not a fixed cost: principal and interest are fixed, but HOA dues, taxes, insurance and repairs go up every year. Investors call us to sell Florida portfolios, but many would have to take something like a 30% haircut, so they hold and hope rates fall.
One in ten rentals is a home that did not sell. These are accidental landlords: they could not sell, so they rented the home out and kept their low rate. In Jacksonville, the figure I show is 6.9%. That adds to rental supply, and in some areas around Jacksonville rents are already 10% to 20% off the peak; in parts of Austin, 30% to 40%. Vacation homes are being sold two for every one bought.
New homes now cost less than resale
Builders put up a massive amount of supply on the outskirts of town: cookie-cutter homes on zero-lot-line and 10-foot lot lines, some without garages, priced around half a million dollars far from the job centers. To move them, builders slash prices and offer incentives of $50,000 or more in some cases, undercutting resale sellers. Existing owners now compete with new construction, and that is where short sales start popping up.
Rental vacancy is the highest in about a decade
The Census Bureau put the U.S. rental vacancy rate at 7.6% in the third quarter of 2026. After the 2020 to 2021 squeeze, we built so many units that vacancy is heading back toward a historically soft level. That is why I say there is no housing shortage. There is a housing mismatch. The units are there. They are too expensive for the people who want to live in them, which means prices have to come down.
There is one positive stat: national rents turned positive for the first time since 2023. Regionally, some areas are getting crushed on rents and some are doing well. I do not expect rents to move up much from here, because wages are not keeping up with inflation. And after the rate hikes, apartment starts are down about 17%, so less new supply should mean firmer rents once the existing inventory is absorbed.
What the Florida data shows
Florida homes are taking longer to sell: 81 days on market versus 61 for the rest of the U.S. in the data I show. Median days on market are back to roughly 2017 levels and could go back to 2014 levels. It could again take three to four months to get a home under contract. You can look up how fast your own ZIP code or neighborhood is selling on our market data pages.
Here is the scary part: in the Redfin data I cite, about 1 in 5 Jacksonville home deals is falling apart, the highest of any metro, with Tampa behind it and the U.S. at 14.5%. A home that comes back on the market looks stale, which gives buyers room to negotiate.
Condos are where it is really dangerous. Florida condos have 7.7 months of supply, and some reports put it over 12 months, while single-family homes are in a normal range around 4.4 months. The median condo price is down 1.8%. Association fees are skyrocketing and insurance is up, so owners are selling, and townhouses have the same problem when the HOA goes from $200 a month to $400. In Southwest Florida, ResiClub data shows some Cape Coral and Fort Myers ZIP codes down 20% to 25% from their peak.
What this means if you are buying or selling
If you are buying, get with a top agent and negotiate like crazy, especially with builders, who have the incentives and the margin. Be careful with adjustable-rate loans at today's prices. If you are selling, price for the market you are in, not the one you remember. Pulling the listing and hoping next year is better does not erase the price history.
People also ask
Do home sellers outnumber buyers in 2026?
Yes. Redfin counted about 1.51 million sellers and 929,000 buyers in September 2026, a 62.6% surplus of sellers and the biggest gap in its records dating back to 2013. Jon Brooks says the gap reflects payments that no longer make sense compared with renting.
Is a housing crash coming in 2027?
Jon does not call it a crash. He expects national prices could end slightly negative and declines to keep spreading in markets that overbuilt, while foreclosures rise gradually rather than in a wave. Rates are the swing factor: if they fall toward the 6.4% Goldman Sachs forecasts for late 2027, buyers return and declines slow. This is his opinion, not financial advice.
Why are so many Florida home sales falling through?
Jon cites Redfin data showing about 1 in 5 Jacksonville home deals falling apart, the highest of any metro, versus 14.5% nationally. Buyers are renegotiating or walking after inspections as payments stay high and more homes compete for them, which gives buyers more leverage.
Full transcript
Read the full cleaned transcript
People keep asking, where did all of the buyers go? It continues to get worse every single week, so let's dig into the data on what is happening in the housing market. The number of buyers is falling to record lows. This comes from Redfin data: sellers now outnumber buyers by 63%. Sellers are at 1.5 million and buyers are at 928,000, and the gap keeps spreading. More and more sellers are coming on the market and fewer and fewer buyers. The numbers make less sense than ever to purchase a home versus renting, and it is causing sellers to reconsider and finally wake up to what has been happening over the last three years: a massive disconnect between property values and wages that is now catching up with the market.
Home prices are now falling in five big cities. This is no longer just a Florida and Texas story. For the last few years the conversation was, "Oh, it's just Florida, it's just Texas." Those are the areas that overbuilt because they thought the demand would continue, and that was not the case. You are seeing Chicago up, Seattle down 2%, and declines in Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, Tampa, Portland, Phoenix and Atlanta. The red is spreading. There are certain areas of the country doing just fine, because they did not have the massive construction boom caused by the pandemic demand shock.
We never had a housing shortage. We had a temporary demand shock in specific areas, specifically in the Sun Belt, and builders reacted by building a massive amount of multifamily and single-family homes. That demand then dried up. There has been a 93% decline in net migration to Florida from the peak, and population growth from abroad has slowed sharply too. When that many people stop coming to an area, and the numbers no longer make sense for locals to buy, inventory stacks up and buyers step back to evaluate their options. That is exactly what we are seeing. The Northeast did not have that experience because it never had that construction boom, so we are seeing a tale of two markets. That said, I expect prices could end up negative for the year, especially if you consider the incentives builders and sellers are giving. Builders and existing-home sellers are competing against each other for a limited pool of buyers.
Sellers are responding across the board. Half of sellers have cut their prices in six states: you can see Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina here. This comes from Parcl Labs, about 44.9% across the board, and those numbers keep moving up as listings stack up and sellers respond. We will find out who the truly motivated sellers are versus the ones who rage quit, meaning they cannot get the price they want, so they pull the property off the market and hope they have a better chance next year. They do not actually have to move. At least 10% of listings have done this, and frankly it does not work. Everybody can see the history of your house online and how many times it has been listed, including what it was priced at before.
When prices start to fall, people start to worry about jobs. With the AI stories out there, it is not necessarily job loss yet, but maybe people just not getting hired. Active foreclosure inventory is moving up, coming off a long period of lows. Those lows were simply because the government came in with workout programs from 2020 to 2025 and said, you don't have to pay your mortgage now, just put the payment on the end of your loan. That delayed a lot of foreclosures for five years, and they are starting to stack up now. Even though foreclosures are up 37% in a year, we are not going to have a foreclosure crisis until we see job loss. Even then it does not happen immediately. Sometimes the foreclosure comes one, two or three years after the job loss, because in judicial states it has to go through the courts, and there are techniques owners use to delay. The overall foreclosure rate is really not that high right now, but we will have a backlog of foreclosures hitting the market over the next few years. It is not a crisis, but it is the highest level since 2019.
We had a massive jump in mortgage rates, all the way up to 7.5% or 7.6%, and now that oil prices have come down a little, rates are starting to move back down. We are back to 7.24%, up from 6.17% a year ago. At the last meeting the Fed held, but it raised rates the month before. This is a big story. Mortgage rates are the primary determinant of what you can afford, and most people cannot afford anything at 7%, not to mention 6%. People are looking for lower rates, which means they are going toward new construction, where they are getting the deals, and they are starting to dabble in ARMs again, which I think is a big mistake. You are taking a lot of risk at the peak of the market in most markets. If mortgage rates come down further, demand will come off the sidelines and buyers will return, because we live in a payment economy. People just need a payment that makes sense for them and their family, and they will buy. Right now the payments make no sense versus renting.
More people are going to ARMs, adjustable-rate mortgages. The share hit 11.3%, the highest in more than a year, and we expect that to keep moving up as lenders find creative ways to get buyers into homes. You saw the Zillow announcement the other day about helping with a 3.5% down payment. This is what happens at the end of a market cycle: larger companies grasping for solutions and coming up with financial engineering to make things work. It is a bad idea, and you can get really burned. If you are a buyer, be careful, because rates could keep moving up with the Fed hiking. There are expected to be another two hikes in the next year, depending on the data. I would not mess around with this, especially if you are strapped for cash.
Goldman has a forecast that mortgage rates will be around 6.4% by late 2027, so we will see how accurate that is. Maybe they expect the conflict with Iran to end, oil to flow, and lower oil prices to bring down inflation. Who knows. Mortgage rates have jumped significantly. If they stay elevated, it will slow the market more. If they come back down, buyers will reenter and slow the declines we are seeing. This is a rate market, and it is also a story of a massive supply glut from builders in the Sun Belt, but there is optimism out there, at least from Goldman.
This is where the disconnect came from: payments are up 97% since 2020, but incomes are up just 33%. That is the gap the newest generation of buyers has been complaining about. The math worked for buyers decades ago. Now the mortgage payments just do not make sense. It changed when the Fed took rates to zero when the pandemic hit, which caused a speculative bubble in prices that now needs to deflate. The problem is that with rates pushing up and record-high prices, even as prices come down, they are not coming down fast enough to keep up with rising mortgage payments. This comes from John Burns Research and Consulting. When you see disconnects like this, you usually see mean reversion. It does not happen overnight, because real estate is an illiquid asset, but it does eventually happen.
Because of that disconnect, mortgage purchase demand is near 30-year lows. This chart should terrify you if you are a loan officer. Purchase applications are down 18% from last year, and the index is at 134.1, near 30-year lows, because the math broke. The mortgage market is in a severe recession and it is getting worse. People are not refinancing either. Unless prices and rates come down at the same time, it is likely to stay in the dumps for quite some time.
Owners are paying 4.4% on their loans and new loans are at 7.24%, and that gap keeps a lot of sellers stuck. They do not want to sell, lose their 4.4% rate and buy again at 7.24%. That is why a lot of people are sitting still and transaction volume is down. A lot of the transactions in 2020 to 2022 were people selling and buying because they finally had a great opportunity and it made sense on paper. We call this the lock-in effect, and we expect it to continue, especially if rates keep moving up. We see moves here and there from life events like divorce, death or illness, when people have to move. But if they do not have to move, the choice becomes a math problem, and it is really difficult.
Homeownership is also lopsided by age: 79.1% of householders 65 and over own a home versus 36.6% of those under 35. There are charts showing how few adults under 35 are able to buy a home and start a household. The math is broken, and I think that will be a big problem for the economy over the next ten years, from the tax base to government services, unless population growth picks back up.
This is a great chart to look at: inventory is climbing. Earlier in the year everybody said it would be a great year. In July that changed direction as mortgage rates moved up. Fewer people are purchasing and inventory is stacking up. There are 5% more homes on the market than last year, more than in 2019, and it is heading the opposite direction going into year-end. Usually a lot of people take their house off the market for the holidays. This year people are leaving their house on the market unsold and not getting buyers. Open houses sit vacant and sellers ask, where are the buyers? Well, you are priced wrong. If you priced at a level that made sense for a buyer, they would transact. The good news is the demand is there. People want to be homeowners. The math no longer makes sense, and they are waiting for it to make sense.
Certain areas have had a massive housing glut. This comes from Nick Gerli: a massive supply pileup is happening in Seattle right now. Seattle listings are up 173% in just three years. We saw something similar in Florida and in Texas, and we expect it to continue. Migration patterns, builder patterns and affordability all matter, so we watch supply, demand and affordability in all of these markets.
Now, one in 15 sellers is asking less than what they paid, and this is where you start to see the distress. Colorado Springs is at 17.2%, Denver at 15.7%, then Hawaii, San Francisco, Lakeland and Punta Gorda. These sellers probably bought during the peak years. 2022 and 2023 will probably go down as some of the worst years to purchase real estate as we go through this correction, and people are already taking losses. That does not even include round-trip transaction costs, which are usually up to 8%, plus concessions to buyers for repairs to make the deal work. Nationally, about 6.7% of homes for sale are listed below the owner's purchase price. When you include all the costs, it gets pretty dangerous, and Colorado Springs is one of the places where sellers are getting hit the hardest.
Investors are also dumping real estate. Investors are now 16.6% of homes for sale, up from 12% in February. The math no longer makes sense. A mortgage payment is not fixed: principal and interest are fixed, but you still have HOA dues, taxes, insurance and repairs that go up every year. We get calls all the time from people trying to sell portfolios here in Florida, but at today's rates they would have to take a 30% loss on price, and they will not do it. So they hold on and pray rates go down so they eventually get bailed out. That is what multifamily owners have been saying for the last three years, and they are not getting bailed out. Their cash flow is disappearing into their mortgage payments.
One in ten rentals is a home that did not sell. This is the accidental landlord: people cannot sell when they list, so instead of staying, they rent the home out, move, and try to keep their low rate. The math is iffy, depending on where you are, and it is part of why we are seeing so much rental supply. In some areas around Jacksonville, rents are down 10% to 20% from the peak already, which changes the entire calculus. In Austin, rents are sometimes down 30% to 40%, which is a crash in rents. At some point it will overcorrect and come back, but we have no idea when. In Jacksonville, 6.9% of owners are accidental landlords. That is a dangerous statistic. It means they could not sell, turned the home into a different product, and now have to be a landlord, which is not as fun as it looks. I used to own 200 units, and it is not something I want to get back into soon. Vacation homes are also being sold two to one: two sold for every one bought, held for five months, and the trend continued into July. That is when things got worse, because mortgage rates moved up, which is why rates are the number one factor we watch.
Another interesting fact: new homes now cost less than resale. Builders built a massive amount of supply on the outskirts of town, cookie-cutter homes on 10-foot and zero lot lines, some without garages, and they are still trying to sell them for half a million dollars far from the jobs, competing against existing homes in the area. So they have to slash prices and give massive incentives, in some cases $50,000 or more. The builders are undercutting sellers to clear inventory and get their money back, and builder margins are evaporating. We expect that pain to continue. That puts pressure on existing owners to compete with the new builds, and that is where we are seeing short sales pop up.
The other directional change is that vacancy for multifamily and single-family rentals is the highest since 2014. This is from Lance Lambert, using Census Bureau data back to 1956. In 2020 and 2021 everything was super tight, you could not negotiate, and rents skyrocketed. Now that rents are up and we built so many units, vacancy is going back to a normal level, and likely to a historically soft level. This is why we say there is no housing shortage. There is a housing mismatch. The units are there to fill. The problem is that they are too expensive for the people who want to live there, which means prices will have to come down.
There is one positive stat: national rents turned positive for the first time since 2023. I do not know how long it will last. Regionally, some areas are getting crushed on rents and some are doing very well. This is what happens when you have a demand shock, rates at zero and massive speculation: years of correction. I do not see rents moving back up much, because rents follow wages and I do not see wages keeping up with inflation. I think rents will keep dipping across most of the Sun Belt, while the Northeast, with limited supply, still does well. The rate hikes have also cut apartment building: after the hikes, apartment starts fell 17%. Builders are saying vacancy is higher and the numbers no longer work, so they are not starting new projects. Less new supply means firmer rents once we absorb the inventory we already have, and builders are adjusting quickly as demand levels off.
Some markets are doing better or worse than others, and Florida homes are taking longer to sell: 81 days, versus 61 for the rest of the U.S. Every area is different. You can go to movewithmomentum.com, search your exact neighborhood, see how fast homes are selling and compare, and check out the map. We are happy to be a resource. Median days on market is moving up, which is what happens with a glut of inventory, and we expect it to keep rising. We are back to about 2017 levels and could go all the way back to 2014 levels. When I started selling real estate, 120 days on market was the norm, so it could take three to four months to get a home under contract again.
Here is the scary part: one in five Jacksonville home deals is falling apart. Jacksonville is number one, Tampa is behind it, and the U.S. average is 14.5%. Some builders have about 25% of their deals fall apart and come back on the market. That is very disruptive if you are a seller, because your home comes back as a stale listing and buyers can see it was under contract and fell through. As a buyer, you have a great chance to negotiate in this environment. If you are going to buy, get with a top agent and negotiate like crazy, especially with builders, because they have the incentives and the margins. Existing owners may not have as much room, because they could be underwater with nothing more to give.
On the condo side, this is where it is really dangerous. Florida condos now have 7.7 months of supply, and some reports say over 12. Single-family is in a normal range at around 4.4 months. The median condo price is down 1.8%. Condos are getting crushed: association fees are skyrocketing, insurance is up, and owners are selling because the math has disconnected. It is not just condos, it is townhouses too, with association fees going from $200 a month to $400 a month on top of inflation, and owners are having trouble staying. Cape Coral ZIP codes are down as much as 25%. Across Cape Coral and Fort Myers, some ZIP codes are down 20% and some are down 25%. This comes from ResiClub, and we have similar data on movewithmomentum.com, where you can go into your ZIP code and see how things are doing.
Drop a comment and tell me where you are and what you are seeing on the ground. If you want to look up your county, ZIP code or neighborhood in Florida or Georgia, go to movewithmomentum.com and search it, and tell me which features you like or are missing. We are putting a ton of data out there. Last thing: I would love to hear what you think will happen in the next six months. We have the midterm elections, interest rates and the conflict with Iran to watch. Tell me which area you are in, because that shapes the conversation. If you are in the Northeast, you may say, "We are not seeing it here," and if you are in the Sun Belt, you may say things are really bad. I want to hear from you. Thanks so much, and I will see you next week.
Sources: Redfin, home sellers vs. buyers, September 2026 (Oct. 14, 2026); ICE First Look, September 2026, via WRE News (Oct. 27, 2026); Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey (Oct. 29, 2026); MBA Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey via Newsquawk (week ending Oct. 23, 2026) and RISMedia (Nov. 4, 2026); Census Bureau Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Q3 2026 (Oct. 28, 2026); Fed rate decision, October 2026. Figures from Parcl Labs, Goldman Sachs, John Burns Research and Consulting, Nick Gerli, Lance Lambert, ResiClub and the Redfin metro cancellation, listing and investor data are as Jon presents them in the video and have not been independently verified here.
This article is adapted from Jon Brooks's video and includes his personal opinions and forecasts. It is for general informational purposes only and is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Market projections are uncertain and are not a prediction for any specific property. Consult a licensed professional about your situation.