Think Nobody's Buying Homes Right Now? Think Again.

If you’ve been thinking about selling, you’ve probably run into headlines suggesting buyers have all but disappeared. There’s a real difference between a market that’s slower and a market that’s stalled, and lately the two get talked about as if they’re the same thing.

Mortgage rates are still higher than most people would like. Homes aren’t selling as fast as they were a few years ago. And there’s no shortage of headlines, and social media posts, about buyers sitting on the sidelines or a crash finally arriving. But the data tells a different story than the headlines do. A slower market and a collapsing one aren’t the same condition, and treating them as interchangeable leads to bad decisions on both sides of a transaction.

Buyer demand has held up better than the narrative suggests.

More sellers are getting to put a pending sale sign in the yard right now than at the same point in the last two years, and they’re doing it heading into a time of year when activity usually starts to slow. That’s worth paying attention to if you’re thinking about listing.

Why Pending Sales Are the Number to Watch

Most of the numbers that get quoted in market coverage (closed sales, median price, days on market) describe transactions that were decided weeks earlier. A closed sale today reflects a buyer’s decision from a month or more ago. It tells you where demand was, not where it is.

Pending sales are different. A pending sale means a buyer looked at conditions as they exist right now, mortgage rates included, and decided to move forward anyway. That makes pending sales one of the more current signals available for reading actual buyer behavior, rather than buyer behavior from a month ago.

HousingWire data shows more homes going under contract right now than at the same point in the past two years:

That doesn’t mean buyers are everywhere. It means the buyers who are out there are still acting, not just browsing. And even if that pace shifts in the weeks ahead, the current trend is still running ahead of where it’s been.

Who’s Actually Buying Right Now

People haven’t stopped buying homes. They’ve become more selective about when.

A lot of today’s buyers are moving because they’ve decided they can’t keep waiting on a life event: a growing family, a new job, retirement, a divorce, whatever it is. Mortgage rates staying elevated doesn’t change the calendar on those decisions. As Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist at the National Association of Realtors (NAR), explained:

“A late spring buyer rush—even with mortgage rates not budging—is an indication of pent-up housing demand and consumers’ acceptance of above-6% mortgage rates as the new normal.”

That matters for how you think about your buyer pool. Today’s buyers aren’t casually touring open houses on a Sunday afternoon. Most have already spent months watching rates and deciding they’re done waiting. They’ve done the math and arrived at a number they can live with, which means they show up with a purpose and a timeline, not just curiosity.

What a Smaller, More Decisive Buyer Pool Means for Your Sale

A market like this behaves differently than a market with a large volume of casual lookers. There are fewer buyers overall, but a higher share of the ones who do show up are prepared to act.

That changes what you should watch for as a seller. In a high-volume market, an overpriced listing eventually gets rescued by sheer traffic. Enough showings will eventually produce an offer even if the price is off. In a market with fewer, more purposeful buyers, that safety net is gone. If the price and presentation aren’t right the first time, the listing doesn’t get a second wave of traffic to correct it. It sits.

The signal to track isn’t how many people are walking through your house. It’s whether showings are converting to offers, whether the feedback coming back is about price or about the property itself, and how quickly a serious buyer moves once they do show interest. A slow trickle of showings that convert at a normal rate is a pricing story. A steady stream of showings that go nowhere is a property story. Those are two different problems, and they call for two different fixes.

Bottom Line

This year’s housing market is moving slower than a lot of people hoped for, but buyer demand hasn’t disappeared the way the headlines, and the social media posts, suggest. The buyers are there. Munkel Real Estate Solutions tracks pending-sale activity specifically because it’s a more current read on demand than closed-sale statistics, and that distinction matters when you’re deciding how to price and position a listing in a market like this one.

Source: HousingWire; National Association of Realtors (NAR)