Mortgage rates that nearly doubled this year have sidelined buyers, leading sales to drop throughout the nation. The crazy bidding wars of the recent past are receding as sellers become more flexible: 92% of owners who sold their homes in the past year accepted some buyer-friendly terms, according to a new report from Realtor.com.
The Case-Shiller indexes are slow-moving benchmarks that reflect three months of activity, so this report shows April-to-June pricing. You can even see the market chill in one-year movements. “The deceleration in U.S. housing prices that we began to observe several months ago continued in June,” said Craig Lazzara, a managing director at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “It’s important to bear in mind that deceleration and decline are two entirely different things, and that prices are still rising at a robust clip.”