Home prices rise slightly, continuing the 'nobody's market' in housing

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Home prices across the country are growing more slowly, conditions which will likely please neither buyers on the sidelines of a market that’s still unaffordable, nor owners who saw neighbors sell for bonanza prices just a few years ago.

Price changes differ between various data providers. The real estate data analytics provider Cotality estimates the national average increase at 1.2% between September 2024 and September 2025, down from earlier this year. Redfin, the national brokerage, calculates the September annual gain at 3.1%.

And the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced Nov. 25 that prices had increased 3.26% between the third quarter of 2025 and a year earlier.

There’s a lot more agreement on how hard it is for many Americans to afford to buy.

“As of mid-September, with 30-year rates at 6.26%, it required $2,148, or 30% of the median household income, to make the monthly principal and interest payment on the average-priced home,” according to the October ICE Mortgage Monitor report. That’s lower than during the summer, but still 5.4 percentage points above the long-run average.

And a recent report from Realtor.com explains that the “K-shaped economy” phenomenon of growth for higher-income brackets and decline for lower market tiers – has come for the housing market as well.

Through the first seven months of the year, the report explains, sales of homes priced above $750,000 were 5.8% higher than the same period in 2024, while sales below $750,000 were down 3%. “In other words, more expensive homes are driving a larger share of market activity, while more affordable segments continue to contract.”

Market 'top' might be over

Meanwhile, homeowners who may be thinking about selling have to contend with the reality that they may have missed a recent market “top.” While most real estate agents and other professionals counsel that buying and selling a home should be based on real-life needs, not market timing, knowing that they might have been able to command higher prices not long ago can rankle some owners.

More: It's not a seller's housing market anymore. Some sellers don't agree

“I think there's a backlog of homeowners who saw their neighbors getting, you know, 5 or 10 or 20% over asking price, selling in a weekend, having 40 showings a day, and they want that for themselves, but we're never going to see that again,” Maura Neill, a real estate agent with RE/MAX Around Atlanta, told USA TODAY earlier in November.

Some recently-published Redfin data bears that out. “The number of home listings that were pulled off the market rose to a historically high level in September,” its analysts wrote. “Sellers are delisting because so many listings are going stale; many homeowners would rather stay put than accept a low offer.”

As a result, one real estate agent told USA TODAY, it's a "nobody's market."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Home prices are rising slowly. Nobody's happy about it.