A $750,000 Home That Took a Year and $100,000 Off to Sell

A Texas homeowner listed her four-bedroom house for $750,000 in April 2025 — and finally sold it for $650,000 more than a year later, after throwing in $9,000 for repairs. Liz Suder's ordeal is playing out across the country as America's stagnant housing market forces sellers to slash prices and pay buyers' costs just to close a deal.

The mechanics are straightforward: surging mortgage rates, years of compounding price gains and high inflation have pushed homeownership out of reach for many buyers. Others are delaying purchases and hoping for better conditions, perhaps in the spring. Sellers easily outnumber shoppers, and those who can't wait are stuck choosing between aggressive price cuts and concessions, or putting major life plans on hold.

"The dynamic has shifted back toward more of what we call buyers' markets rather than sellers' markets," said Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Financial. "(That) means you might have to reduce your price, you might give a concession to get your home sold, it might have to stay on market longer."

It's a stark reversal from earlier this decade, when rock-bottom mortgage rates fueled a buying frenzy and sellers routinely collected bids above asking. Sellers who can pull their listings generally are doing so, real estate agents say. Those who can't face mounting pressure to cut prices and kick in thousands of dollars toward buyer costs.

How bad is the buyer-seller imbalance?

The numbers quantify the squeeze. Last month, there were about 63% more sellers than homebuyers across the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, according to an analysis by Redfin. The buyer count — roughly 929,000 — was the fewest on record dating back to 2013, while sellers hit their highest level since 2020.

The average rate on a 30-year mortgage, after briefly dipping below 6% in February, surged as high as 7.4% this month, its highest level in nearly three years. That upward march has stifled U.S. home sales.

Realtor.com's data shows the price pressure building. The national median home listing price fell 1.2% year over year in September to $419,250 — the 11th consecutive monthly decline. About 21% of listings in September had their initial price lowered, a four-year high.

"It's sort of like an indicator of where the market is right now, with buyers gaining leverage at the expense of sellers, and sellers doing more now to meet buyers halfway," said Jake Krimmel, a senior economist at Realtor.com.

Buyers aren't just asking for help with closing costs. Higher mortgage rates are giving them leverage to press sellers for money to buy down their rate for a few years or for the life of the loan, cutting their overall borrowing costs. That's good news for shoppers, but it may not be enough to overcome the affordability hurdles keeping many on the sidelines.

What does a stalled sale cost a homeowner?

Suder, 56, a finance director who owned her Murphy, Texas, home — about 20 miles outside Dallas — for 21 years, wanted to downsize after her three kids moved out. She listed at $750,000, cut the price several times over six months, then pulled the house off the market. She relisted in February at $725,000 ahead of the spring season. The eventual buyer paid $650,000, plus her $9,000 repair credit.

"I was waiting to sell the house before I started looking," Suder said. "I didn't want to have two mortgages."

"I never expected it to take a full year, and for me to have to reduce the price by that much," she said.

In Blaine, Washington, Rick Ganga can't cut deep enough even if he wanted to. The 58-year-old operations manager is divorcing and must sell his three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house, which hit the market June 1 at $825,000. A reduction to just under $800,000 hasn't moved it.

"There's (been) no offers, virtually zero traffic," Ganga said.

Some neighbors have dropped their asking prices by $100,000 or more, but Ganga bought his home only in 2022 and hasn't built enough equity to go lower. "That's not anything I'm going to entertain," he said. "It doesn't make sense."

His plans to transfer with his company to another state now wait on a sale he doesn't expect until spring or summer of next year.

Ethan Butner, 36, a service manager in Troutdale, Oregon, about 16 miles east of Portland, has an accepted offer on a bigger home near Portland — but can't proceed until his own house sells. It's sat on the market more than two months at $480,000. He cut $30,000 off the price, drew one offer, and watched it fall through. He's since installed a new hot water heater and dishwasher and replaced the flooring.

"It's been a roller coaster of emotion for myself, my family, especially my fiancée," Butner said. "We've had this vision of being in our own home and all the kids having their own rooms and all the good stuff that comes along with that. We definitely feel stuck at the moment."

With buyers near record lows and sellers at their highest count since 2020, the concessions game looks set to run well into the spring selling season.