Housing markets where homebuyers are gaining power heading into spring 2026

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When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up.

Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that shift has varied.

Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has jumped above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months.

Where is national active inventory headed?

National active listings are on the rise on a year-over-year basis (+12.1% between December 2024 and December 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some sellers markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyers markets.

Nationally, we’re still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-5.5% below December 2019) and some resale markets, in particular chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight-ish.

While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent months—more than typical seasonality would suggest—as some sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted in weak/soft markets.

December inventory/active listings total, according to Realtor.com:

• December 2017 -> 1,127,799 📉
• December 2018 -> 1,185,865 📈 
• December 2019 -> 1,033,887 📉
• December 2020 -> 612,300 📉(Pandemic Housing Boom overheating)
• December 2021 -> 445,303 📉 (Pandemic Housing Boom overheating)
• December 2022 -> 680,925 📈 
• December 2023 -> 714,176 📈 
• December 2024 -> 871,509 📈 
• December 2025 -> 976,833 📈

If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+105,324 homes for sale), we’d have 1,082,157 active inventory come December 2026. 

Below is the year-over-year active inventory percentage change by state.

While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places too).

As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. That’s where home sellers next spring are likely, relatively speaking, to have more power than their peers in many Southern markets.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sun Belt and Mountain West, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda and Austin.

Many of these areas saw major price surges during the Pandemic Housing Boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Punta Gorda and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices.

This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new home supply in the Sun Belt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable deals—which then puts some additional upward pressure on resale inventory.

At the end of December 2025, 17 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia—which we left out of this analysis—is also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels too. Softness in D.C. proper’s predates the current admin’s job cuts.)

Big picture: Over the past few years we’ve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the Pandemic Housing Boom. While home prices are falling some in pockets of the Sun Belt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets still eked out a little price appreciation in 2025. Nationally aggregated home prices were pretty close to flat in 2025.

Below is another version of the table above—but this one includes every month since January 2017.

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