Nearly half of the people who bought a home in August, 44.7%, walked away with some kind of concession from the seller, according to Redfin. That is the highest share for any August since the brokerage began tracking the number in 2020, and it is up from 42.6% a year earlier. The trend points to a market where sellers, sitting on a large stock of unsold listings, are increasingly covering costs a buyer used to pay alone.
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The National Concession Numbers
Redfin’s September 18 report found that 44.7% of U.S. home sales in August included a seller concession, up from 42.6% in August 2025 and the highest share for that month since the brokerage began keeping the count in 2020. A concession is money or a benefit the seller adds on top of the sale to close the deal without lowering the listed price outright: covering part of a buyer’s closing costs, paying to buy down the mortgage rate for a year or two, or crediting cash toward repairs a home inspection turned up. Redfin also found that 15.8% of home sales combined a concession with an outright price cut, up from 15.6% a year earlier, meaning a growing share of sellers gave ground twice on the same sale rather than once.
Where Buyers Have the Most Leverage
The concession share varies sharply by metro area. Atlanta led the country at 72.8%, followed by Charlotte at 67.9%, Phoenix at 67.4% and Las Vegas at 66.7%, all Sun Belt markets that added large numbers of new homes over the past several years. San Jose sat at the opposite end, at 4.2%, down from 10.2% a year earlier, a sign of how little room Bay Area sellers have had to give in a market where housing remains scarce relative to demand. Amanda Peterson, a Redfin Premier agent in Dallas, said buyers there are pressing that advantage: “Buyers know they can be picky. They’re asking for every concession under the sun.” She added that with so many homes for sale, buyers are holding out for one that checks every box rather than settling quickly.
A Wider Imbalance Between Buyers and Sellers
The concession data lines up with a broader shift Redfin has tracked through the summer. A separate Redfin estimate put the number of home sellers in August at roughly 1,534,918, against about 972,300 buyers, a gap of 58%, the widest in the company’s records dating back to 2013. That gap had been 52.1% the month before, meaning the imbalance between people trying to sell and people actively shopping kept widening rather than narrowing. Nashville posted the largest local gap, with 139% more sellers than buyers, followed by Miami, Houston and Orlando. When sellers outnumber buyers by that much, each individual buyer gains room to negotiate, and that shows up directly in the concession numbers Redfin reported for August.
Prices Are Still Climbing, Just More Slowly
Concessions have not stopped home prices from rising, only slowed how fast they are rising. Redfin’s home price index for August put the national median up 3.7% from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace in 12 months, even as the month-over-month gain slowed to 0.25%. San Francisco led all metros with 12% annual growth, while Dallas was the only major metro to post an annual decline, down 1.4%. Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics, said slower price growth works in a buyer’s favor because it lowers the cost of waiting for the right listing rather than rushing into an offer. Taken together, the concession share, the seller surplus and the price data describe the same market from three angles at once: more homes sitting on the market, less urgency to bid over a seller’s asking price, and sellers competing on terms rather than price cuts alone.
What a Concession Does and Does Not Solve
A concession changes the math on the day a home closes. It does not change what the new owner owes the following spring, when a first property-tax bill or a reassessment notice arrives, or what a first winter of heating and cooling costs looks like in an unfamiliar house. Those bills follow a separate calendar from the one Redfin tracked in its concession data, set by local tax assessors and utility providers rather than by a real-estate contract, and they land regardless of how good a deal a buyer got at the closing table.
Most of the concessions Redfin counted take one of three forms: a credit toward closing costs, a temporary buydown of the mortgage rate for the first year or two of the loan, or money set aside to cover repairs an inspection flagged before the sale closed. None of those forms lower the price a county assessor uses to calculate a property-tax bill, since assessors generally work from the recorded sale price or an independent appraisal rather than the net amount a buyer actually paid after concessions. A buyer who negotiated a large concession can still see a property-tax bill based on the full purchase price, which is one reason the relief programs that apply after closing matter as much as the negotiation that happens before it.
The Costs a Concession Doesn’t Touch
A seller-paid closing credit or a rate buydown, the kind of concession Redfin counted in 44.7% of August’s home sales, lowers the cost of closing on a house. It does nothing about the property-tax bill or the heating and cooling costs that start arriving the month after the sale, and those run on a completely separate set of deadlines.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit lays out the five kinds of property-tax relief and the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters, alongside an application log for tracking filing windows.
Log the closing date against the local relief filing windows →
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor before publication.
