While the US housing market cools down and enters a seasonal late-summer transition, price drops are hitting some metropolitan areas much harder than others—and it might not be where you think.
High mortgage rates and shifting local supply-and-demand dynamics have driven down list prices across the country, though more slowly in August than in previous months.
Sellers are trending toward more realistic pricing, and the market is seeing broader price corrections. Metro areas that saw explosive, COVID-19 pandemic-era growth are now experiencing some of the deepest cuts in the price per square foot.
In August, the price per square foot—a measure that controls for the size of homes on the market—decreased year over year for the 10th straight month.
Nationwide, housing prices per square foot are down 1.8% year over year, and median list prices fell year over year in three of the four regions (-3.6% in the Northeast, -2.6% in the South, and -2.1% in the West), while prices remained flat in the Midwest.
At the metro level, the median list price per square foot fell in 36 of the top 50 metros in August, another sign that it’s “game over” for unrealistic seller demands.
The largest price-per-square-foot declines were in Austin, TX (-8.1%); Tampa, FL (-5.6%); and Memphis, TN (-4.1%). The largest gains were in Providence, RI (+9.3%); Indianapolis (+4.4%); and Chicago (+3.6%).
Among the 50 biggest metro areas, these saw the biggest annual declines in listing price per square foot in August:
- Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX: -8.1% Median listing price: $450,000
- Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL: -5.6% Median listing price: $391,950
- Memphis, TN-MS-AR: -4.1% Median listing price: $299,995
- San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA: -3.9% Median listing price: $908,700
- San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX: -3.6% Median listing price: $324,450
- Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO: -3.40% Median listing price: $574,913
- Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD: -3.2% Median listing price: $375,000
- San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA: -2.7% Median listing price: $899,000
- Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL: -2.6% Median listing price: $417,000
- Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA: -2.4% Median listing price: $595,000
Realtor.com® senior economist Jake Krimmel says some of this market shift in these cities may be due to continual readjustment following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“One common thread for most markets—including Austin, Tampa, San Antonio, Denver—is 2020–22 boomtowns continuing to give back some of their pandemic-era gains. These are also, by and large, places with much more inventory now than pre-pandemic norms,” he says.
One outlier is San Francisco, where the market saw a 3.9% decrease in price-per-square-foot costs, despite its status as an ultracompetitive market.
In July 2026, active listings fell 16.3% from the previous year, tightening up the housing market even further. And while the median listing price in the market remains high—$908,700—it has decreased by 5.2% year over year.
Veronica Peter is a real estate agent with Compass serving the Fremont area, which is on the southeastern edge of San Francisco and close to Silicon Valley, where most of her clients work. She says the market is being affected by the shifts in the tech industry. Many of her clients are quietly reeling as AI transforms their industry.
“A huge portion of our workforce in Fremont holds tech-related jobs such as software engineers, data analysts, and web developers,” she tells Realtor.com. Many heavy tech hitters, including Oracle, Meta, Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon, have implemented “quiet layoffs” as they restructure with AI in mind.
The encroaching instability in the tech workforce has meant that while the housing market “has certainly not crashed, pricing [has] adjusted to meet buyers where they are today,” she adds.
At recent open houses, she’s heard similar sentiments: Tech workers are uncertain about their employment and feeling the strain of high interest rates. Many also invested heavily in tech stocks, which have slumped this year.
“A softer stock market depleted the funds buyers were planning to use for their down payments,” she says.
There’s been a marked shift in the housing inventory in the metro area, Krimmel adds.
“It’s not about San Francisco homes losing value, but rather how expensive the available inventory is this year relative to last,” he says.
“There are fewer small, pricey homes in the center of the city for sale. They are scarce and selling fast. On the flip side, this year there are relatively more large, less expensive per-square-foot homes coming up for sale in outer suburbs,” he says.
Real estate experts note that these downward adjustments offer a welcome silver lining for prospective buyers who have felt sidelined by affordability constraints over the past few years.
As active inventory continues to build nationally—climbing toward levels not seen since late 2019—sellers in these cooling markets are increasingly forced to reevaluate their pricing strategies to attract a more selective pool of financially qualified buyers.
Whether these double-digit or near-double-digit pullbacks represent a temporary normalization or the beginning of a broader regional shift will depend heavily on local economic momentum and upcoming changes in mortgage rates as the autumn buying season approaches.
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