Redfin: 44% of Sellers Are Giving Concessions
(Image courtesy of Redfin)
Redfin, Seattle, found home sellers gave concessions to buyers in 44.4% of transactions in the first quarter.
That’s up from 39.3% in Q1 2024, and just narrowly below the record of 45.1% hit in early 2023.
Redfin defines a concession as when an agent reports a seller provided something that helped reduce the buyer’s total cost of purchasing the home. For example, concessions could include money toward repairs, closings costs and/or mortgage rate buydowns. It doesn’t, however, include instances in which the seller lowered the list price of their home due to negotiations with the buyer.
“Buyers used to ask for concessions to cover little things like repairs. Now they’re negotiating concessions so they can afford to buy a home,” said Chaley McVay, a Redfin Premier Real Estate Agent in Portland, Ore. “A lot of sellers are offering money for mortgage-rate buydowns, and I recently had one seller cover seven months of HOA fees for the buyer.”
Among the 24 major U.S. metropolitan areas Redfin analyzed, Seattle saw the highest frequency of concessions, at 71.3% of transactions. That’s nearly double 36.4% in the first quarter of last year–the largest increase among the list of metros.
The next biggest increase was in Portland, Ore., where concessions were up 14.2 percentage points to 63.9%, also the second highest rate. Next was Los Angeles, up by 11 percentage points to 56.1%, San Jose, Calif., up by 10.6 percentage points to 16.7% and Houston, up 6.2% to 46%.
New York saw the biggest drop in concessions, present in only 5.5% of home-sale transactions and down 15.7 percentage points from a year earlier. Also seeing significant declines were Miami, down 13.1 percentage points to 33.8%, San Antonio, down 10.9 percentage points to 44.4%, Tampa, Fla., down 9.2 percentage points to 33.9%, and Phoenix, down 3.5 percentage points to 51.2%.
More than one in five homes–21.5%–that sold during the first quarter had a final sale price below the asking price in addition to a concession, up from 18.5% a year earlier. Redfin also found 13.4% of pending home sales were cancelled in March–pegging the trend to economic jitters. That’s up slightly from March 2024, and the third highest March in records dating back to 2017–with March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic taking the top spot.
