Nearly 1/3 of Atlanta home sellers dropped prices last month

Whip out your wallets, homebuyers: Atlanta sellers are slicing prices!

Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple. This time of year, as the weather cools down—it will cool down soon, right?—the housing market becomes less active.

And like the temperature, the market typically heats back up in the spring and summer, when homes tend to sell for higher prices. (According to a report by real estate market tracking site Redfin in May, metro Atlanta homes were being unloaded faster than ever before.)

Now, new Redfin research shows that, around August, more than a quarter of home sellers nationwide had to drop their asking prices. Could it be an early indication of a softening market?

Some 26.6 percent of homes listed experienced a price drop—the highest that figure has been since Redfin began tracking it in 2010.

And in Atlanta, that number is even higher.

Redfin

Nearly 28 percent of homes listed in Atlanta experienced a price drop in the four weeks ending September 16—up 9 percentage points from last year.

That makes Atlanta, along with Las Vegas (28.1 percent), San Jose (25.7 percent), and Seattle (37.1 percent), among the markets with the “biggest year-over-year increases in the share of homes with price drops,” according to Redfin’s data.

So what’s going on here?

“After years of strong price growth and intense competition for homes, buyers are taking advantage of the market’s easing pressure by being selective about which homes to offer on and how high to bid,” said Redfin Senior Economist Taylor Marr, per the report.

“But there are some early signs of a softening market, and the increase in price drops may be another indicator that sellers are going to have trouble getting the prices, and the bidding wars, that they may have just months ago,” Marr continued. “Instead, many are finding their homes are sitting on the market without much interest until they start reducing their prices.”

• More than One in Four Home-Sellers Dropped their Price Last Month [Redfin]