Housing Market Crawls Along

For the housing market, the winter of 2025–26 could be called the Year of the Turtle. It took longer to sell a house, but the deal eventually got to the finish line.

Oh yeah. February’s buyers also nailed a better deal than in any February in three years.

According to the latest tabulation from the Redfin real estate brokerage, it took a whopping 66 days — more than nine weeks of  showings, keeping the place tidy, and locking the dog away — for a house to find a buyer in February.

That’s the slowest sales pace in a decade!

Almost 14% of those deals fell out for one reason or another and never made it to settlement, Redfin found. But the rest closed, 22.5% at above the listing price. 

On average, though, sellers still walked away with 98.2% of what they were asking.

“House hunters have been waiting for mortgage rates to drop, and they finally fell below 6% a couple of weeks ago,” said Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin. “One of our agents had a client lock in a 5.6% rate!”

Rates are back up now, however, and the market has slowed to a crawl. Both pending sales and new listings ticked down in February, 2.4% and 5.3%, respectively from a year ago.

Sales prices also were crawling along. They were still up, but less than 1% year-over-year, to $429,259 on average.

With sellers now outnumbering buyers by more than 40%, it’s now a buyer’s market. The negotiating power is now on their side, and they cannot only afford to take their time, they are.