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In these 5 U.S. cities, homes are sitting unsold for months at a time

Sellers in a handful of U.S. cities have lost their edge. House Buyers of America's new index shows exactly where

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Homeowners planning to sell this year are running into a market that behaves nothing like it did three years ago. Active listings are piling up in many parts of the country, price cuts have become routine rather than exceptional, and homes that once fielded multiple offers within days are sitting for weeks or months before a buyer commits. That shift matters because a seller's plans, timing a move for a new job, downsizing after the kids leave, closing an estate, often assume the market will cooperate on a reasonable schedule. When it doesn't, sellers face a choice between waiting longer than planned or accepting less than they expected.

Several forces are driving that shift at once. Mortgage rates well above the ultra-low levels of a few years ago have kept many owners from selling and buying again, since giving up a 3 percent loan for something closer to 6 percent erases much of the financial logic of moving. At the same time, new construction has continued in many cities even as resale demand cooled, adding supply just as fewer buyers are qualified or willing to pay current prices. Job losses in specific industries have compounded the effect in some regions, thinning out the pool of local buyers who would otherwise absorb that supply. The result is a housing market that looks nothing like a single national story, with conditions ranging from still-competitive to sharply tilted toward buyers depending on the city.

House Buyers of America tracked these conditions across the 100 largest U.S. cities, building a Buyer Advantage Index from five market signals, inventory growth, price-cut share, days on market, pending-sale ratios and sale-to-list price ratios. The company combined those signals into a single score for each city, with a higher score signaling a market that has swung further toward buyers. Five cities posted the highest scores in the country, each one showing sellers just how much leverage has shifted since the frenzied years of the pandemic housing boom.

Cathy Holewinski / Unsplash

Toledo, Ohio, posted a perfect score of 100 on House Buyers of America's Buyer Advantage Index, making it the single hardest city in the country to sell a home in right now. Active inventory in Toledo is up more than 30 percent year over year, and the median time a home spends on the market has climbed 33 percent over the same period. Those two numbers together describe a seller who used to face competition for a listing and now faces the opposite problem, a growing shelf of unsold homes competing for a shrinking pool of interested buyers.

Toledo isn't an isolated case. Five other Ohio cities all land in the top half of House Buyers of America's index. Something appears to be happening across the state rather than in one local economy alone. Ohio's affordability has long been one of its biggest selling points, with home prices well below the........

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