Just over three-fifths of home offers faced competition in July, the lowest level since January according to Redfin.
According to the real estate brokerage’s latest data, 60.1% of July offers written by Redfin agents faced bidding wars, down from a June rate of 66.5% and a pandemic peak of 74.1% in April. Year over year, the bidding war rate was up from 57.9%, but that’s somewhat expected given the lockdown-era recovery mode the housing market was going through in July of last year.
Following months of sizzling competition, conditions appear to be stabilizing at least a little for homebuyers, with housing supply slowly increasing. Seasonality is also at play, per Redfin, with competition typically easing in the summer after the active spring buying months.
“Competition has started to slow in the last three weeks. We’re now seeing five to eight offers on homes instead of 25, and they’re coming in $5,000 to $10,000 above the listing price instead of $50,000 to $60,000,” said Scott Mercer, a Redfin real estate agent in Sacramento.
“Buyers are pushing back. They’ve even started including appraisal contingencies again and making requests for repairs—things that were pretty much unheard of last year.”
Some areas, however, remain hot spots for competition. Fort Collins, Colorado, had the highest bidding-war rate among 47 metros analyzed by Redfin, with 77.3% of July offers facing competition. Metros in the South and West remain high among the list of competitive cities, with Orlando (77% bidding-war rate), Nashville (74.6%), Honolulu (74.1%) and Colorado Springs (73.2%) following Fort Collins atop the ranking. Of all markets examined by Redfin, the 15 with the highest rates of competition were all in the South or West.
