Home Sellers Gave Concessions in 44.7% of August Sales, Highest Share Since 2020, Redfin Reports

Home sellers gave concessions to buyers in 44.7% of U.S. home sales in August, up from 42.6% a year earlier, according to a report from Redfin published September 18, 2026. That's the highest share for the month of August since Redfin started tracking the data in 2020.

Redfin defines a concession as anything a seller kicks in to cut the buyer's total cost: closing costs, repairs, or a mortgage-rate buydown. It does not count a straight-up price cut. Sellers are also cutting prices. In August, 15.8% of home sales included both a price drop and a concession, up from 15.6% a year earlier, the highest share Redfin has recorded.

The concessions aren't limited to cash toward closing costs. Fortune reported that one Redfin agent in Atlanta threw in a free week-long stay at an Airbnb owned by the seller, while a Redfin Premier agent in Charlotte, North Carolina offered an all-expenses-paid cruise to close a deal. Builders, meanwhile, are offering $10,000 to $20,000 in straight concessions on new construction, according to Redfin.

Why Sellers Are Suddenly Desperate

The driver is simple math. Sellers outnumbered buyers by 58% in August, according to Redfin, the largest gap in the brokerage's records and the strongest buyer's market since it started tracking the metric in 2013. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate sat at 6.95% as of the most recent Freddie Mac survey, with other national surveys putting it above 7%.

America's supply of homes for sale hit a 10-year high in August, according to the National Association of Realtors. That's a direct hangover from the pandemic building boom, when remote work sent people flooding into cheaper Sun Belt metros and builders in Texas, North Carolina, Arizona and Tennessee ramped up construction to match. Now demand has cooled, rates haven't, and the inventory those builders put up is sitting on the market.

"Buyers know they can be picky. They're asking for every concession under the sun," Amanda Peterson, a Redfin Premier agent in Dallas, told Redfin. She described clients who walked away from a home they loved because the pantry was too small, even after the seller offered to alter the floor plan. "There are so many homes for sale that buyers are holding out for one that checks every box," Peterson said.

Sun Belt Bears the Brunt

Eight of the ten metros with the highest concession rates are in the Sun Belt, per Redfin. Atlanta topped the list at 72.8% of deals involving a concession, followed by Charlotte (67.9%), Phoenix (67.4%), Las Vegas (66.7%) and Raleigh (66.3%). Nashville, Houston, Denver, Riverside, California, and Virginia Beach rounded out the top ten, each with roughly three in five sellers offering concessions.

Concessions were rarest in San Jose, California, at just 4.2%, and New York, at 5.7%, markets where housing supply never caught up with demand the way it did in the Sun Belt.

Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather argues the headline price data undersells how much the market has actually softened. The national median home price rose about 2% year-over-year as of August, which on its face looks like a seller's market. But Fairweather said that number ignores concessions entirely. "This is more of a guesstimate," Fairweather said, "but I think if we were to quantify all these concessions, we would see that home prices are down, and people are getting better deals."

One Divergence Worth Flagging

Business Insider's coverage framed the trend almost entirely as "good news for homebuyers," a fair point for anyone shopping right now, but it glossed over what the same data says about builders and sellers eating real losses to move inventory. Capital Economics estimates 2026 is on track to be the weakest year for home sales since 2011. An entire regional building boom, fueled by years of artificially cheap pandemic-era money, is now correcting the hard way.

That correction was arguably overdue. Years of near-zero rates inflated home prices well past what wages could support, and the bill is now coming due in the form of stalled sales and desperate sellers throwing in cruises. Whether mortgage rates ease enough to unstick the market depends largely on the Federal Reserve's rate path through the rest of 2026, something neither Redfin nor Capital Economics is willing to predict with confidence.