The Market Just Tipped Toward Sellers, But Not Everyone Got the Memo

This week, Sioux Falls closed more homes than it listed, even as sellers filed 46 price cuts over the trailing four weeks.

Here's the read for this stretch of Sioux Falls: it's a market tilting toward sellers, and tilting a little further that direction by the week. You wouldn't guess that part from how many sellers are still trimming their own asking price.

The clearest sign is simple stock and flow. 120 homes closed across the territory this week. Only 76 new listings came on to take their place. Every week that gap shows up, the shelf gets a little thinner, and a thinner shelf is good news if you're the one selling.

Even so, the shelf isn't empty. 589 homes sit active across the territory right now, which works out to about 4.6 months of supply. That's closer to balanced than it is to a shortage, so call this a market moving in sellers' direction rather than one that has fully arrived.

Here's the part that keeps it honest. Over the trailing four weeks, 46 active listings took a price cut. Against 589 homes on the market, that is not a rounding error. A meaningful slice of the sellers who are supposed to be catching a break from this week's closing pace are instead adjusting downward, which means plenty of homes went up at a number the buyers shopping right now didn't agree with.

Put those two facts side by side and the picture sharpens. Demand is outrunning new supply territory-wide, which is exactly the kind of thing that usually hands sellers leverage at the table. But leverage only shows up if the listing was priced for the buyers who are actually out looking this month, not the ones an owner hoped for when they set the number. A lot of sellers found that out the hard way.

The territory's median list price sits at $339,900. The median sale price, $327,750, landed under that.

Homes are also taking a median 39 days to sell, and trading at about $183.26 a square foot territory-wide. None of that says panic. It says patience still matters, even in a stretch where sellers had the wind at their back.

If you're selling, this is not permission to chase last month's asking price. Getting the number right on day one is worth more right now than the cushion of fewer competing listings. If you're buying, the same numbers cut the other way: fewer new listings are landing each week than are leaving the market under contract, so a home that actually fits your list is worth moving on rather than waiting to see what else shows up.

Watch two things from here. Whether new listings start catching up to the closing pace, which would ease the shelf back toward balance. And whether the price-cut count keeps growing at the same clip, which would say sellers are still recalibrating faster than buyers are showing up to meet them. Either answer changes the read.

Michelle Maloney