Not Much Competition for September Homebuyers

Although the percentage of offers submitted by buyers represented by Redfin agents that faced competing bids increased by a point between September and August, let’s still call the fall season a buyers market.

Just 11% of September offers were in a bidding war compared with 10% during August. The number of bids facing competing offers was down 41% from a year earlier.

“After the coolest spring home-selling season in at least eight years, homebuying competition didn’t have far to fall, but low mortgage rates ultimately drove a modest uptick in bidding wars in late summer when they typically become less common,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. “With mortgage rates likely to remain near historic lows, I expect the bidding war rate to continue to level off—rather than follow its typical end-of-year descent—as 2019 comes to a close.”

What will really be telling is whether or not the market begins to heat up this coming spring, now that we’re starting from a cooler baseline than 2017 or 2018 as 2019 winds down.

To see a chart about the rate of bidding wars by cities …

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