Bankrate Buyer Opportunity Index | Bankrate

Prospective homebuyers in Texas are demanding thousands of dollars in price cuts as once-hot real estate markets cool off. It’s the same in Southwest Florida, where owners are offering to repaint their homes in hopes of enticing buyers.

Even a little prayer helps, said Emily Alspaugh of Grandville, Michigan, who buried a statue of St. Joseph in her backyard as she waited for buyers to notice her three-bedroom duplex.

“We picked the wrong time to list our house,” said Alspaugh, who had been waiting for three weeks (and counting) for an offer. While her corner of suburban Michigan is still a relatively strong market, it now takes three times as long to sell a home there as it did in 2022. “It’s not going as well as I had hoped.”

An exclusive Bankrate analysis of real estate data shows the U.S. housing market has shifted dramatically – and unevenly – since the pandemic, presenting a rare opportunity for prospective buyers in some unexpected places. Homes that were snapped up in a weekend four years ago can now sit unsold for months in some communities. In others, the market doesn’t appear to have changed much, if at all.

“There is a stark divide in housing market conditions across the U.S.,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS, a large listing service in the mid-Atlantic region.

Bankrate’s Buyer Opportunity Index examines housing data in 100 U.S. metro areas to show where buying power has shifted the most over the past few years. It reveals buyers have gained the most negotiating power since the pandemic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. They’ve gained the least in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York.

The shifts are a reflection of how local housing markets responded to the Covid era, which roiled both supply and demand as hundreds of thousands of Americans migrated out of urban areas and interest rate cuts sparked a housing boom. Homebuilding picked up considerably in many corners of the country in response, especially in the suburbs and along the Sun Belt as communities made room for thousands of new residents.

Now, prices have caught up with demand and home sellers in former Covid boomtowns are competing with new homes that recently hit the market.

“It’s a necessary correction,” said Mike Hollow, broker-owner at Blue Line Realty SWFL in Fort Myers, Florida, and president-elect of the local Realtor association. “We don’t like seeing double-digit (price) appreciation. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

The biggest swings to a buyer’s market

Bankrate’s Buyer Opportunity Index scored the 100 largest U.S. metro areas across four key metrics: housing supply, discounted listings (the percentage of for-sale homes in an area that have cut their asking price), the median time homes sit unsold, and the median sale-to-list ratio. It then ranked each according to their relative market strength (100 is the strongest buyer’s market, 1 is the weakest) and compared how those rankings shifted from 2022 to 2026.

How much are these market shifts felt at the local level? Take a look at Colorado Springs. The picturesque city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains saw housing supply quadruple from February 2022 to February 2026. The influx of new homes sapped home owners’ negotiating power as a result.

Homes now sit unsold for an average of 54 days in Colorado Springs, nearly 11 times as long as they did four years ago. And 25% of the area’s home listings have cut their asking price at least once, up from 8% four years ago.

It’s even worse in some cases, said Patrick Muldoon, a Colorado Springs real estate agent who recently received an offer on a home that previously sat for 976 days. Muldoon recently has been telling sellers to expect their home to stay on the market for 90 days – nearly twice the amount of time it usually takes to sell a home in his area. He’s also been cautioning buyers that if they plan to stay in their home for less than three years, they’ll be better off renting. 

“You have a lot of uncertainty right now,” Muldoon said. “You have higher interest rates that have not come down, despite what everyone said. Unemployment ticked up. On top of that, everything costs a lot. There’s really not any reprieve.”

Here are the five metros that experienced the biggest shifts toward a buyer’s market over the past four years:

Areas of stability for sellers

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the metro areas with little population growth and sparse new construction dropped the most in Bankrate’s Buyer Opportunity Index between 2022 and 2026. 

This isn’t because conditions in these Northeastern and Midwestern metros have changed significantly for sellers since 2022, but because they have remained relatively consistent while Sun Belt markets shifted drastically in favor of buyers. As buyer leverage grew elsewhere, these places have emerged as the country’s most resilient sellers’ markets by comparison.

These are the five metros that dropped the most in Bankrate’s index since 2022:

Compared to the Sun Belt, these northern communities have experienced much different migration trends in the past five years. 

For example, Chicago’s population shrank by 0.2% from the 2020 Census to 2025. And little new construction is happening there – Chicago has 10 times the population of the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton market, but builders pulled fewer permits last year in the Chicago metro area than in the much smaller Sarasota market.

As a result, while the number of discounted homes more than doubled over the past four years in the Sarasota metro area, rising to 26% from 11%, they rose only slightly in Chicago, to to 20% from 14% in the same period.

What you can do

During the pandemic, housing market conditions were similar from coast to coast. Now, though, the advice for homebuyers and sellers varies depending on where in the country you’re buying or selling.

• For buyers in seller’s markets: If you’re shopping in a region that’s still very competitive, things haven’t changed much from the pandemic. When you see a home you like, you’ll need to quickly make an aggressive offer. You might not have to waive the home inspection, but you’ll still have to move decisively if you want to buy a house.
• For buyers in buyer’s markets: If, on the other hand, you’re shopping in Texas or Florida, you can afford to slow down a bit. There’s plenty of inventory available, and sellers have been forced to reckon with the new reality by cutting prices and offering concessions. You can work with your real estate agent to tour plenty of homes and to patiently study the market.
• For sellers in buyer’s markets: If you’re looking to sell a home in the Sun Belt, get ready for a rude awakening: Expect to keep your house on the market for months rather than weeks, and be prepared to entertain offers below what you think your home is worth.

Data Reporter Alex Gailey contributed to this story.

• Methodology
  

  The Bankrate Buyer Opportunity Index ranks the 100 largest U.S. metros to identify where buyers have the most bargaining power in today’s market compared to early 2022. This dual-year analysis ensures that our rankings account for long-term market shifts.

  To determine the rankings, we analyzed four key Zillow metrics that signal a buyer-friendly environment: months of supply (inventory vs. sales volume), the share of listings with active price cuts, median days on market and the median sale-to-list ratio.

  We standardized the metrics with Z-scores and then mapped them onto a 1 to 100 scale. A score of 100 represents the maximum opportunity for buyers — markets where supply is high, homes sit longer and sellers are more likely to offer discounts. A score of 1 marks the most competitive markets where sellers still maintain the upper hand. This index measures relative negotiating leverage and market cooling; it does not account for absolute affordability, such as mortgage rates or local wages.