MW Where home buyers have landed the best deals we've seen on houses in over a decade
By Aarthi Swaminathan
A quarter of recent home buyers who paid below the list price got a discount of 10% or more, the highest share since 2012
The average discount buyers scored on a home in 2025 was about 7.9%, Redfin said, the highest share in 13 years.
Home buyers are scoring the biggest discounts in over a decade as the housing market sags from weak demand. So where were all the deals?
In 2025, about six in 10 home buyers in the U.S. bought a house below its original list price, according to data released Monday from real-estate brokerage Redfin, which is owned by Rocket Companies (RKT).
The average discount buyers scored on these homes was about 7.9%, Redfin said, the highest in 13 years.
The median original list price was $399,900, so buyers were getting about $31,600 knocked off when they closed on the home.
Some were even more fortunate amid today's historic housing-affordability crisis: A quarter of recent home buyers who paid below the list price got a discount of 10% or more, the highest share since 2012.
Redfin looked at the 50 most populous metro areas in the U.S. and analyzed annual Multiple Listing Service data comparing original list prices with final sales prices.
The fact that these home buyers were able to knock off tens of thousands of dollars of their home purchase is partly a result of the housing-affordability crisis in the U.S., which has forced some sellers to cut their prices to lure buyers.
Home sales remained at a 31-year low in 2025 and most buyers are locked out of homeownership because of high prices and high mortgage rates. The frustration over housing costs has also become a major political issue in recent years.
Against this backdrop, "discounts have become increasingly common partly because homes have become increasingly tough to price, with market dynamics shifting rapidly and varying widely from place to place," according to Redfin.
"This is part of the normalization of the housing market," Brad Case, chief residential economist at Homes.com, told MarketWatch.
As sellers accept the reality that they need to make price cuts, that's providing some price relief. Over the past few years, sellers listing their homes for sale "were just hoping to get lucky by putting an outrageous asking price on it and seeing whether they'd get a bite," Case said.
Those days are over. Now, sellers listing their homes "genuinely want to sell," and they're willing to compromise, he added, which is a "healthy development." In today's market, "both buyers and sellers now have a better sense that they can work on a deal" that works for both parties, he added.
Location, location, location
There are pockets where buyers landed particularly big deals, such as in the Midwest and Sun Belt.
In West Palm Beach, Fla., home buyers who paid less than list price on their home last year got an average of 11% knocked off - the highest among the biggest 50 metros in America.
The median original list price for a West Palm Beach home in 2025 was $549,000; 88% of homes in the metro area sold below that.
Tied for second on the list were Detroit, Mich., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
In the Motor City, buyers who paid less than list price got an average of 10.3% knocked off. The median list price was $205,250. About 53% of homes sold below asking.
In Fort Lauderdale, buyers who paid less than asking got 10.3% of the price knocked off as well. About 87% of homes sold in the city were below original list price, which was $489,000.
Pittsburgh, Miami and Tampa, Fla., rounded out the rest of the top five areas where discounts were most common.
These were the top metro areas ranked by the average discount for homes that sold below the original asking price:
Metro area Median original list price Average discount for homes that sold below asking price West Palm Beach, Fla. $549,000 10.9% Fort Lauderdale, Fla. $489,000 10.3% Detroit $205,250 10.3% Pittsburgh $259,900 9.9% Miami, Fla. $599,000 9.8% Tampa, Fla. $399,000 9.6% Philadelphia $299,999 9.5% San Antonio, Texas $325,000 9.1% Cleveland, Ohio $249,000 9% Austin, Texas $474,958 9%
Condo buyers are scoring the biggest discounts
Condo buyers also found good deals on the market last year. About 68% of condo buyers paid below list price in 2025, Redfin said.
Buyers got an average of 8.1% off the home's listing price, compared to the discounts single-family buyers and townhome buyers got, which were 7.9% and 6.5%, respectively.
Condo demand has dropped recently as high homeowners-association fees and insurance costs are putting off some prospective buyers, as well as special assessments that are on top of monthly fees to maintain the property.
Newly built homes are also being discounted
Buyers have also found deals in newly built homes, as MarketWatch has reported previously.
The median price of a newly built home has trended unusually lower than the median sales price of a previously owned home in recent months.
In other words, the median-priced newly built home sold for $392,300 in October 2025, while the median-priced existing home in the same month sold for $414,900.
Read more: Looking for a house under $300,000? Here's why newly built homes may offer the best deals.
Builders have been piling on discounts to boost sales: In January, 40% of builders cut prices, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders. Over the past few years, builders have preferred to offer sales incentives to lure buyers, but are now forced to cut prices.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, major builder PulteGroup $(PHM)$ boosted incentives that amounted to 9.9% of a home's sales price, up from 7.2% from the same period a year before.
Incentives can range from offering mortgage-rate buydowns to free closing costs, or free upgrades on appliances.
For now, "we'd expect to see the discounts remain elevated," Ryan Marshall, chief executive of PulteGroup, said on the company's earnings call.
The average sales price of a PulteGroup home purchased by a first-time buyer also went down 6% to $438,000 from $467,000 last year, Marshall noted.
D.R. Horton $(DHI)$, another major American home builder, also expects to keep offering sales incentives to get buyers through the door. In its first-quarter earnings call, Chief Executive Paul Romanowski said that they "expect incentives to remain elevated in fiscal 2026."
The four big housing markets where buyers are still paying over asking price
On the flip side, buyers were still going above and beyond in four of the 50 most populous metro areas in America.
In San Francisco, the typical home buyer paid 3.8% over list price, which was the biggest premium in the nation, Redfin said.
The tech hub was followed by Newark, N.J., where the typical buyer paid 3.1% over asking, San Jose, Calif. (2.3% over asking) and Oakland, Calif. (1.3% over asking).
Why are homes in the Bay Area still so expensive? "The Bay Area housing market has heated up in recent months amid a boom in the AI sector and a return to the office," the Redfin report's authors said.
Plus, "it's also worth noting that it's typical for Bay Area homes to sell for a premium because Bay Area sellers have been known to purposely underprice their homes to create bidding wars," they added, "but this premium has been shrinking."
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-Aarthi Swaminathan
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February 02, 2026 17:25 ET (22:25 GMT)
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