Is Now a Good Time to Buy a House? Inside the Biggest Buyer's Market Since 2013

Mortgage rates near 7.5%. Home prices up for 39 straight months. By every headline number, this should be one of the worst times in a decade to buy a house. And yet sellers now outnumber buyers by the widest margin since 2013 — which is exactly the kind of mismatch that, historically, has created the best buying windows for the people willing to look past the headline.

A sourcing note before the numbers: the market statistics in this guide are reported by Redfin and cited here as such — they haven't been independently re-pulled from Redfin's own data by OmniFin Portal, and housing data moves fast. Verify current figures at redfin.com/news before relying on any specific number below.

The affordability trap

Start with the honest, unflattering numbers. The median U.S. home sold for $417,000 in September — the 39th straight month of year-over-year price increases. At the same time, the 30-year mortgage rate has climbed to roughly 7.5%, about a full percentage point higher than earlier in the year. On a $400,000 home with 20% down, that one-point move alone adds roughly $300 a month to the mortgage payment — for a house that didn't get any better.

Zoom out further and it gets worse: the typical monthly mortgage payment nationally is up 8.8% year-over-year, the highest level on record in Redfin's data. For a buyer to get back to last year's monthly payment, prices nationally would need to fall roughly 11% just to break even against the higher rate. If you stopped reading right here, “don't buy” would be the entirely reasonable conclusion — but the national number hides something that matters more.

The housing split: one national market, hundreds of local ones

“The housing market” isn't one market — it's hundreds of local ones moving in opposite directions at the same time, and the national median hides that completely.

• Overbuilding: markets like Austin and much of Texas and Florida built heavily during the pandemic boom; new construction discounts to keep selling, dragging down every comparable home around it.
• Prices that outran local incomes: pandemic-era remote-work migration bid up some cities faster than local paychecks could support — once rates rose, buyers had to rely on local income again, and prices had to come back down to meet it.
• Rising cost of ownership: homeowners insurance in Florida has roughly tripled since 2019 — when a policy jumps from $3,000 to $9,000 a year, that cost comes straight out of what a buyer can afford to offer.

The seller's panic: why leverage has shifted

According to Redfin, there are now 63% more home sellers than buyers nationally — the widest gap in their records, which go back to 2013. In raw numbers, that's roughly 1.5 million sellers competing for 900,000 buyers. Of the 50 largest U.S. metros, 41 are now officially buyer's markets. Miami is the starkest example: despite being up 57% since 2020, it now has 160% more sellers than buyers. The result: 22% of listings have already taken a price cut (a record high in Redfin's data), the typical home sits on the market for 49 days, and pending sales are down 12.7% year-over-year.

A 10% offer under asking on a $400,000 home is a $40,000 discount — $8,000 less to put down, and roughly $300/month less on the mortgage for the life of the loan, directly offsetting the rate increase above. Run that discount through your own Net Worth Tracker to see what it actually does to your balance sheet.

Buying the crash: what the 2008-2011 playbook looked like

This pattern — everyone agreeing it's a bad time to buy, right up until it turns out to have been the best time — isn't new. One investor who got a real estate license in 2008, just as that market began falling, has described starting with far less competition simply because so many agents had already given up. By 2011, with prices down 50-60% from their peak, he was writing lowball offers on a regular basis while a survey of economists at the time found that nearly half expected prices to fall again, and not a single one expected a full recovery within five years. The offers that got accepted later multiplied several times over in value — precisely because almost nobody else was writing them.

To be clear: today is not 2011. Prices aren't down 50-60% — they're near record highs, and mortgage rates are near their own multi-decade high at the same time, a genuinely unusual combination. But the behavioral pattern — widespread agreement that buying is a bad idea, right as leverage quietly shifts to the buyer — is the same one that preceded that earlier window. Run what a negotiated discount, redirected into investing instead of a bigger down payment, could grow into with the Compound Interest Calculator.

The honest bottom line

Affordability is genuinely worse than it's been in years — that part is true, not clickbait. But “worse affordability” and “bad time to negotiate” are two different claims, and right now they point in opposite directions in most of the country's largest metros. This isn't a call to buy any house, anywhere, at any price — renting remains the cheaper option in a lot of markets on the pure numbers, and overbuilt markets like Austin may still have further to fall. It's a case for doing the math on your own specific target, in your own specific city, before assuming the national headline applies to you.