Real Estate Tracker: What the US Housing Market Is Doing, in Dollars

Zillow's typical-home value is the fastest dollar-denominated national price series. Price growth of +1.0% against ~3% wage growth means real home prices are currently falling — the slow-motion affordability adjustment that follows every payment shock.

Existing plus new home sales, annualized. The July 2026 pace of 4.67M is the 13th percentile of the combined series — activity, not price, is where the rate shock landed.

The composition tells its own story: new homes as a share of everything sold. Builders can cut prices and buy down mortgage rates — resale sellers sitting on 3% loans can't — so builders captured an unusually large share during the 2023-25 freeze — the 12-month average peaked above 14%, higher than anything in 2008-2019 — though the latest monthly reading has eased back toward its long-run middle.

The monthly principal-and-interest payment on the typical home (20% down, 30-year fixed). This is the series that explains the frozen market: the payment roughly doubled between 2021 and 2023 and has barely eased since. Buyers experience payments, not prices — and sellers locked into ~3% mortgages experience the same math in reverse, which is why so few homes are listed.

The most important split on this page: the housing overhang is concentrated with builders, not homeowners. New-home supply at 9.6 months is the 95th percentile of six decades — recession-era territory — while resale supply sits at just 4.6 months, a broadly balanced market. Reading the new-home number alone would badly overstate how oversupplied US housing is: existing homes are ~88% of all sales.

The resale shelf itself: active for-sale listings bottomed near 700K in the 2022 frenzy against a ~1.5M pre-pandemic norm — the rebuild since is inventory normalizing, not (yet) distress.

And the construction pipeline, split the way the market splits — because new-home sales cover only single-family houses, while the multifamily rental pipeline is a different market on a different cycle. Completions running above starts means a pipeline draining: future supply thinning in real time.

Redfin's estimate of how many buyers and sellers are actively in the US market — the cleanest single picture of the buyer strike. As of May 2026, an estimated 1.01M buyers faced 1.48M sellers — sellers outnumber buyers by 47%. This is a Redfin model estimate and not a count of people: sellers are active MLS listings (which our Zillow listings series corroborates independently), while the buyer side leans on Redfin's internal tour-to-close data.

The same estimate, metro by metro — the direct answer to the “national averages hide local markets” caveat below. Of the 50 large metros Redfin classifies (July 2026), 39 are buyer's markets (sellers far outnumber buyers), 5 are balanced, and only 6 still favor sellers. The two tables below are the extremes of that spread, straight from the report.

Redfin's own market classification of the 50 most-populous metros (July 2026 report); a positive number means sellers outnumber buyers — which hands buyers the negotiating power. Metros with insufficient data are excluded by Redfin. Data from Redfin.

The Fed's Z.1 accounts value the owner-occupied housing stock at $48.8T: $34.9T owned outright by households, $13.9T owed on mortgages. The equity share — 71.6%, the 84th percentile since 1945 — is the single cleanest difference from 2007, when the share had already eroded to ~60% before prices broke. High equity plus ~2% delinquencies means almost nobody is forced to sell; that is how a frozen market stays a frozen market instead of becoming a crash.

The stress gauge on that balance sheet: the share of single-family mortgages at banks that are past due. At 1.86% it sits in the 20th percentile of its 35-year history — the 2010 peak above 11% is what an equity-starved housing market looks like when prices break. Forced selling needs borrowers who can't pay and can't sell their way out; today's equity cushion removes the second condition.