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 +1.2% 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 August 2026 pace of 4.61M is the 9th 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 same payment measured against what a household earns. In September 2026 it took 25.4% of the median household’s income before taxes, the 86th percentile since 2000. The peak was 29.5% in October 2023, above the 26.9% of July 2006 at the top of the 2000s bubble; the low was 13.3% in December 2012, and the median month since 2000 is 19.8%. Payment and income are both in the dollars of their own month, so inflation cancels out of the ratio and no adjustment is needed.

The most important split on this page: the housing overhang is concentrated with builders, not homeowners. New-home supply at 8.5 months is the 88th percentile of six decades — recession-era territory — while resale supply sits at just 4.8 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 September 2026, an estimated 0.93M buyers (the lowest in the 2013+ record) faced 1.51M sellers — sellers outnumber buyers by 63%. 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 49 large metros Redfin classifies (August 2026), 36 are buyer's markets (sellers far outnumber buyers), 8 are balanced, and only 5 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 (August 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 $49.8T: $35.8T owned outright by households, $14.0T owed on mortgages. The equity share — 71.9%, the 85th 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.