Contract signings rose for three consecutive months this spring and outpaced last April’s levels by 3.2%, a shift buyers' agent Samantha Gradle says she has felt at the kitchen table. "The last six months have gotten really, really nice," Gradle said, and she added: "I’ve had buyers get a lot out of sellers very recently."
The numbers behind that anecdote are small but meaningful. Completed home sales eked out a small gain from a month earlier, the share of sellers who cut prices in April fell 1.3 percentage points from a year earlier, and median list prices per square foot also fell in April, according to Realtor.com data. Contract cancellations and pulled listings, which jumped last year, returned to more seasonally typical levels this spring — a sign listings and demand are reconnecting after a year of fits and starts.
That reconnection is visible in specific markets. Buying and selling activity in Raleigh, North Carolina, has been healthy, and sellers there have become more willing to offer concessions such as paid roof repairs. In Jacksonville, Florida, price cuts dropped 5.1 percentage points from a year ago, and in Miami they were down 4.4 percentage points — moves reflected in recent increases in contract signings in both coastal markets. In the Philadelphia metro and nearby suburbs, the share of sellers cutting prices declined 3.4 percentage points from March to April, data from Redfin shows.
Analysts say those local shifts reflect a broader change in how sellers are approaching pricing. "It’s not just that more buyers are coming to market, but that sellers are pricing initially at a level that is basically meeting buyers where they are," said Jake Krimmel, describing what he called a new, tentative middle ground. The result: fewer headline price cuts and more transactions that actually stick.
But the truce between buyers and sellers sits on a brittle foundation. Mortgage rates have risen sharply in recent weeks amid global concerns about inflation and the Iran War, and that pressure is already showing up in buyer calculations. "Affordability has deteriorated some since February," Krimmel said, framing the central tension: gains in activity can be erased by higher borrowing costs.
Buyers on the ground describe the tightness that still persists. Brenda Beiser said the market requires persistence: "Buyers have to work really hard to get a house," she said, and added plainly, "There’s very little to choose from." Her words underline that rising contract signings are not the same as abundant inventory — they reflect more matches being made among a limited pool of homes.
That limited supply helps explain why sellers in pockets of the country are increasingly pragmatic. As some pandemic boomtowns have seen prices drift down from their peaks, sellers have adopted concessions, initial list pricing closer to market, and fewer pulled listings. Those shifts — fewer price cuts in markets from Miami to Jacksonville to Philadelphia, concessions in Raleigh, and a steadying of cancellations — suggest buyers and sellers are, for now, finding common ground.
Still, the immediate outlook is clear: this spring’s momentum matters because it reverses a year in which deals frequently failed to close, but it may be short-lived. With mortgage rates rising and affordability worsened since February, Krimmel warned: "It’s going to be a question of when — not if — it eats into housing demand." The most likely next turn is that higher rates will slow or even reverse the modest recovery in contract signings, leaving a market where activity has improved but remains vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks.
