More homeowners are choosing to delist their properties rather than lower their asking price as they wait for more favorable offers.
Realtor.com, a real estate listings website, announced in its July 2025 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report delistings for the previous month were up 38 percent since the start of the year and 48 percent from June 2024.
For every 100 newly listed homes this past June, 21 homes were delisted, Realtor.com said.
The real estate site found sellers were delisting their homes because they couldn’t find anyone willing to buy at a price they found acceptable.
A Wall Street Journal report from June found a growing number of homeowners who bought in pandemic boomtowns owe more than their homes are worth.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, those with substantial savings who wanted a larger living space were driven to buy homes in towns such as Austin, Texas and Cape Coral, Florida, while mortgage rates were low, the report said.
But the WSJ reported these homeowners have been increasingly facing underwater mortgages, when a home loan has a higher principal than the market value of the property.
This leaves homeowners in a tricky situation. Now that their homes are worth less than they owe on their mortgages, if they want to sell, they’d have to pay their mortgage company the remaining balance once they sell at a lower price, the WSJ explained.
Some homeowners may also put off selling their home simply because they have a favorable mortgage rate and are able to wait it out.
“Maybe you’re locked into payments that are relatively affordable for you,” Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com told CBS MoneyWatch. “You would prefer to sell, but not at a price that you’re not comfortable with.”
Since June 2019, the average list price has risen by more than 37.6 percent, but there are some cities that have seen house prices drop recently.
Homeowners may still expect to be able to sell their homes at a higher cost given how the market has been in recent years.
“Maybe we’ve gotten a bit spoiled by very high home prices over the last many years, but we are seeing some softness in the market right now,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, told MoneyWatch.
