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Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →There were 902,112 single-family homes for sale across the United States in the week to Friday 2 October 2026, up from 895,398 a week earlier, according to the weekly Housing Market Tracker of the trade publication HousingWire. The column, written by its lead analyst Logan Mohtashami and published on Saturday 3 October, also reports that 42.83% of listings carried a price cut and that 57,724 homes went under contract in the week, against 64,232 in the same week of 2025.
Taken one at a time, none of these figures is dramatic. Read together, they describe the market a seller walks into this autumn: a little more competition on the shelf than last year, a little more discounting, and clearly fewer buyers signing. The tracker sets each number beside the same week of 2025, which is what makes it useful to someone deciding when to list and at what price.
HousingWire Housing Market Tracker, published 3 October 2026; national weekly figures.
More homes for sale than a year ago
Active inventory is the count of homes on the market and not yet under contract. In HousingWire's tracker it covers single-family homes, and it rose by 6,714 between 25 September and 2 October, a gain of 0.75% in seven days.
The comparison with last year is where the story lies. In the same week of 2025 the count went from 862,590 to 863,972, an increase of 1,382, or about 0.16%. So the stock of homes grew roughly five times faster this year than it did in the matching week a year ago, and it did so from a higher base.
On the tracker's figures, a seller listing in the first days of October shared the market with 38,140 more single-family homes than a seller did a year earlier: 902,112 against 863,972, a rise of 4.4%. That is a moderate increase, not a flood. It does mean that a buyer comparing homes has somewhat more to choose from than at this point in 2025, and that a listing has slightly more company.
Related readSelling a mortgaged home in Dubai: the release, the fees, the chequesThe increase did not come from a rush of owners putting homes up for sale. New listings for the week were 64,002, HousingWire reports, against 64,328 in the same week of 2025. That is 326 fewer, a difference of about 0.5%. The flow of fresh listings is, in practice, the same as last year.
When new supply is flat and the total still climbs, the explanation sits on the other side of the ledger: homes are leaving the market more slowly, because fewer of them are finding a buyer. The pending sales figures, further down, say exactly that.
Over four in ten listings have cut their price
The second figure sellers watch is the share of listings whose asking price has been lowered. HousingWire puts it at 42.83% for the week, against 41.6% in the same week of 2025. The gap is 1.23 percentage points.
The level matters more than the change. On this measure, more than four listings in ten on the market have had their price reduced at least once. A seller who has to trim an asking price is therefore in large company; a reduction is an ordinary event in this market, and it was nearly as ordinary a year ago.
A second data provider gives a much lower number, and the two should not be read side by side. Realtor.com's September housing report, released on 30 September, said that 20.8% of active listings had been price-reduced, and described that as the highest September share since 2018.
Two price-cut figures, two different methods
HousingWire's weekly tracker reports 42.83% of listings with a price cut. Realtor.com's September report gives 20.8% of active listings. The two are built on different methodologies and are not comparable: each is best read against its own history.
What the two sources share is the direction. HousingWire's weekly share is higher than a year ago; Realtor.com's monthly share is the highest for a September in eight years. Whichever yardstick is used, price reductions are more common this autumn than last.
Related readDubai sale with a tenant in place: lease, 12-month notice, EjariFewer contracts for the same flow of new listings
A pending sale is a home under contract that has not yet closed. It is the earliest count of buyers committing. HousingWire reports 57,724 pending sales for the week, down from 64,232 in the same week of 2025. That is 6,508 fewer contracts, a fall of 10.1%.
Set against new listings, the change is plain. In the same week of 2025, pending sales and new listings almost matched: 64,232 contracts for 64,328 new listings, a difference of 96. This year there were 57,724 contracts for 64,002 new listings, a difference of 6,278. Put another way, the week's contracts equalled 99.9% of the week's new listings in 2025 and 90.2% in 2026.
The table brings the four weekly measures together.
| Measure | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active inventory | 863,972 | 902,112 | +4.4% |
| New listings | 64,328 | 64,002 | -0.5% |
| Pending sales | 64,232 | 57,724 | -10.1% |
| Listings with price cuts | 41.6% | 42.83% | +1.23 points |
HousingWire Housing Market Tracker, 3 October 2026. Week to 2 October 2026 and the matching week of 2025; changes computed from those figures.
The earliest sign of demand points the same way. Applications for mortgages to buy a home fell 4% from one week to the next and stood 14% below their level of a year earlier, according to the same HousingWire column. An application comes before a contract, so a year-on-year fall of that size gives little reason to expect the pending count to recover in the weeks immediately ahead.
The rate backdrop behind the buyers' retreat
HousingWire's column sets the weekly figures beside borrowing costs. It puts the 30-year mortgage rate at 7.57%. Its headline asks what comes next for housing with mortgage rates of 7%, 8% or 9%, which says a good deal about where the discussion now stands.
Two parts of that rate are worth separating, because the column tracks them separately. The first is the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, the benchmark that mortgage rates follow. Mohtashami had forecast that this yield would stay between 3.80% and 4.60% during 2026; he now cites 5.40% as the level consistent with mortgage rates of 8%. The column's own figures, as reported, do not state the current yield, so no level is given here.
Related readDubai service charges: who approves them and what sellers must clearThe second part is the spread: the margin between the 10-year yield and the mortgage rate. HousingWire puts it at 2.04%, up from 1.98% a week earlier, and gives the historical norm as 1.60% to 1.80%. The spread is therefore 0.24 to 0.44 of a percentage point wider than usual. Borrowers pay that extra margin on top of the benchmark, and it widened in the week instead of narrowing.
For a seller, the point is practical. The buyer's monthly payment is set by the rate as much as by the price. When the rate rises, the same asking price costs the buyer more each month, and part of the pool of buyers falls away. That is consistent with what the tracker shows: steady new listings, fewer contracts, and more sellers adjusting their price.
What an industry chief said at eXp Con this week
The weekly data landed a few days before a blunt reading of the market from inside the industry. Speaking at the eXp Con conference on Thursday 8 October, Leo Pareja, the new chief executive of AGNT, told the audience to stop waiting for a housing collapse because, in his view, it has already happened, HousingWire reports.
His argument rests on volume, not on prices. Existing-home sales are running at roughly 4 million a year, he said. If mortgage rates go above 8% in 2027, he added, existing-home sales could fall below 4 million for the first time since 1995. That is one executive's scenario, not a forecast from a statistical agency, and it depends on where rates go.
Related readSingapore: Bedok gets its first S$1.5 million flat in a week of recordsTwo of his other points bear directly on sellers. The first concerns the so-called lock-in effect, the reluctance of owners with a cheap mortgage to sell and borrow again at a higher rate. For the first time in years, Pareja said, more homeowners have a mortgage rate above 6% than below 3%. As that balance shifts, fewer owners are held in place by a rate they could never replace.
The second concerns the loan already attached to a home. Nearly all FHA and VA loans are assumable, he noted, which means a buyer can take over the seller's existing mortgage. Where the seller's loan carries a rate below today's, that can be a selling point in its own right. Whether an assumption is possible in a given sale depends on the loan and on the parties.
Costs other than the mortgage are part of the conversation too. In an Inman contributor column published on 9 October, Jaromy Tagg, founder and chief executive of Liberty Fair Offer, argues that rising homeowners insurance premiums are nudging some longtime owners to list.
What the figures mean for a seller's plans
None of this tells an individual owner what a particular home will fetch. The tracker is national and covers single-family homes; a city, a neighbourhood or a price band can behave very differently. What the data does offer is a set of reference points to bring to a conversation with a listing agent.
The first is competition. With 4.4% more homes on the market than a year ago and a stock still rising in early October, a new listing is compared with more alternatives than it would have been in 2025. The local count of active listings, and how it has moved over the past month, is the figure that matters for a given home.
The second is price. A share of 42.83% of listings with a cut says that many asking prices were set above what buyers would pay. It does not say by how much, and HousingWire's weekly figures give no size for the reductions.
The third is time. Contracts 10.1% below last year's level, with applications down 14%, mean fewer buyers are active for each home on offer. A seller with a fixed moving date has less room than one who can wait.
The flow of new listings has barely changed from a year ago. Demand has, and the rest of the week's numbers follow from that.
HousingWire publishes its tracker weekly, so the next reading will show whether inventory kept rising into October and whether the wider spread persisted. Sellers weighing a listing this autumn have a simple set of figures to follow: the active count, the share of price cuts, the pending sales and, behind all three, the mortgage rate.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
