In a sign of sellers’ frustration with steadily increasing listing times more property owners are opting to pull their homes off the market rather than lower the asking price.
That’s according to the July 2025 monthly housing report from Realtor.com, which shows that delistings, or homes removed from the market without having been sold, were up 38% in June, since the start of the year, and 48% from a year ago.
“Fewer and fewer sellers are deciding to enter the market, and increasingly more are deciding to jump out” Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com told CBS MoneyWatch.
Delistings for June appear in the July report as a one-month lag for delisting data is needed to determine that a delisted home is truly delisted and hasn’t been sold, Realtor.com notes.
Signs of deadlock
Unable to find buyers willing to pay the original listing price, a growing number of sellers are pulling their homes off the market, rather than compromise on the amount, according the real estate listings website.
One indicator that more sellers exiting the housing market is the ratio between the number of delistings and listings. For every 100 new homes listed nationally in June, 21 homes were taken off the market, the report found. That’s up from 13 delisted homes per 100 new listings in May.
The consequence? A rise in delistings could push buyers and sellers further apart, creating a deadlock in the housing market, according to Krimmel.
“The thing that’s going to prevent buyers and sellers from getting closer together is if all the sellers who maybe could or should be lowering their prices to meet the demand where it is, are instead taking their homes off the market altogether,” he said. “So it’s kind of like keeping us in this holding pattern.”
The trend comes as the supply of homes for sale begins to grow in certain U.S. regions, causing prices in those areas to drop. The number of homes for sale in July rose 24.8% year over year, according to the report, a post-pandemic high.
Despite the rise in housing inventory, sales remain relatively stagnant, with steep prices and stubbornly high mortgage rates continuing to deter many would-be homebuyers, experts told CBS MoneyWatch. That jibes with data from the Realtor.com report which shows that pending home sales, or listings under contract, fell 3% in July compared with last year, nearly double the 1.6% year-over-year drop in June.
Homeowners in no hurry to sell
When sellers are in a pinch, they typically opt to lower the price of their home so they can offload it quicker. However, those who are not up against the same type of time constraints may be willing to wait it out longer — especially if they’re benefiting from a favorable mortgage rate.
“Maybe you’re locked into payments that are relatively affordable for you,” said Krimmel. “You would prefer to sell, but not at a price that you’re not comfortable with.”
Another factor experts say is playing into the delisting trend the surge in housing prices during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the housing market was red hot. As newly remote workers flocked to previously untapped locations like Austin, Texas, home prices rose at record levels, giving sellers a chance to cash in. While the market has since cooled substantially, seller’s pricing expectations have been slower to catch up, experts say.
“Maybe we’ve gotten a bit spoiled by very high home prices over the last many years and but we are seeing some softness in the market right now,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, told CBS MoneyWatch.
That may not be true in all markets, however. Miami is one of the places where sellers have been most unwilling to budge on price. According to Realtor.com’s analysis of June delisting data, 59 homes were delisted for ever 100 new homes listed in the southern Florida city— the highest ratio among the cities Realtor.com tracked. Meanwhile, less than 18% of listed homes in Miami came with a price reduction in July, according to Realtor.com.
“If sellers are choosing to take properties off the market rather than lower prices, it may signal renewed confidence in Miami’s future, and a growing belief that this is a market worth holding for the long haul,” Ana Bozovic, a Miami-based real estate agent and founder of Analytics Miami, told Realtor.com.
Mary Cunningham is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. Before joining the business and finance vertical, she worked at “60 Minutes,” CBSNews.com and CBS News 24/7 as part of the CBS News Associate Program.
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