Home prices just fell the most in nearly a decade. Here’s where buyers have the most leverage
Home prices just experienced their biggest year-over-year drop in almost a decade, according to new data from Realtor.com. The asking price of a new home in the U.S. has fallen consecutively for eight months, according to the new report on monthly housing trends. The average asking price of a new home dipped by 2.5% between June 2025 and June 2026 – one sign of a market coming unstuck. This month, the national median list price for a home sat at $430,000, down from June 2022’s highs around $449,000. “Eight straight months of falling prices and seven straight months of rising pending sales are not a contradiction,” Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale said in the report, adding that those data points are two sides of the same phenomenon. “Sellers are reading market conditions and are pricing accordingly from the start rather than listing high and cutting later, and buyers are taking note and making bids,” Hale said, calling it a “welcome sign” of a healthy housing market. Pending sales were also up for the seventh straight month in a row in June, a 3.7% bump up from June a year ago. According to Realtor.com’s report, the modest rise in homes in the sale process that haven’t yet closed isn’t obscuring anything more worrying under the surface. Across May and April, 6.9% of pending sales flipped into canceled contracts, a number that’s slightly lower than the 7.3% rate of failed deals during the same period a year ago. “Homes are going under contract, and they are staying there,” the report states. Homes aren’t sitting quite so long June marked the end of a 26-month run of homes selling more slowly than they did a year previously, a good sign that the long market slowdown is getting back up to speed. The median home in the U.S. sat on the market for 53 days in June, the same length of time as it would have back in June 2025. There’s some regional variation within that number, with homes in the Northeast spending two fewer days on the market than they di