The housing affordability crisis is forcing homebuilders to do something they’ve almost never done: slash prices on new homes more aggressively than homeowners are for their homes on the market. This is a first for the housing market in recent history, according to a Realtor.com report released Thursday.
“The current housing market is entrenched in an affordability crisis, leaving many average American families feeling excluded from the traditional promise of upward mobility and homeownership,” said Stuart Miller, CEO of Fortune 500 homebuilder Lennar, during a December earnings call. Lennar’s average sales price dropped 10% year over year to $386,000 in Q4 2025, according to its earnings report.
During the fourth quarter of 2025, nearly 20% of new homes faced a price cut, the Realtor.com report shows, and existing home price reductions trail at about 18%. This shift suggests we’re entering a buyer’s market, Realtor.com says, as home prices drop.
Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/02/12/housing-affordability-crisis-new-home-price-cuts-realtor-com-report/
- Nearly half of single Americans earn less than $50,000 per year, compared to just 9% of married couples, according to a recent Redfin survey. That makes it harder to afford housing–which itself has gotten much more expensive over the years. Single people also tend to be younger, which also makes it harder to afford housing.
- We took a look at Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, finding that single condo owners in D.C. pay an annual “singles tax” of nearly $18,000, and single Bay Area condo owners pay over $40,000 more than their married counterparts.
- Single people are nearly twice as likely as married people to stay put because they can’t afford the type of home they want to move to.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of single people struggle to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments, compared with 39% of married people, according to a recent Redfin survey conducted by Ipsos.
https://www.redfin.com/news/struggle-afford-housing-single-versus-married/
High home prices, faltering supply and weaker consumer confidence in the economy all continue to weigh on the U.S. housing market. The chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, is calling it “a new housing crisis.”
Sales of previously owned homes in January dropped a much wider-than-expected 8.4% from December to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 3.91 million, according to the NAR. Sales were 4.4% lower than January 2025. That is the slowest pace since December 2023 and the biggest monthly drop since February 2022.