Every month, there's a temptation to sum up the housing market in one word. Hot, cold, buyer's market, seller's market. August couldn’t be bothered with our descriptions.
Closed sales dropped. Inventory stayed flat. Prices barely budged. Three signals, three different directions, all at once. That's not a market with an easy headline. It's a market asking us to slow down and look at what's actually happening for the person standing in front of us. Because lately, no two buyers or sellers seem to be experiencing quite the same market. Here's where things stood at the end of August:
Active listings: 13,080; essentially flat, down 0.27% from July and up 0.16% from a year ago.
Closed sales: Down 18.99% from July and 17.35% from last August.
Median close price: $594,495 — nearly unchanged from a year ago, though down 1.74% from July.
Time on market: Median days in MLS rose to 27 (up from 21 in July), though still a bit faster than last August's 30.
Detached (single-family) homes and attached homes (condos, townhomes) are telling two very different stories right now.
Inventory: Detached inventory dropped 4.21% year-over-year, while attached inventory grew 9.94%.
Time on market: Attached homes are sitting at a median of 45 days, more than double the 24 days for detached homes.
Prices: Detached prices held roughly flat year-over-year. Attached prices fell nearly 4.87%.
A client selling a condo right now is navigating a genuinely different market than a client selling a single-family home. Part of what's driving that attached-home softness is a shift that's easy to overlook: the average first-time homebuyer is now around 40 years old.
That's a big deal for entry-level housing. Younger buyers, who have historically been the ones fueling condo and townhome sales, are being priced out altogether. Meanwhile, older first-time buyers often have more savings and income built up, which means some of them are skipping the traditional "starter home" step entirely.
For buyers trying to break in early? The math can be brutal. When the monthly payment on an entry-level home eats up more than half of someone's income, the classic idea of the "American Dream" starts to feel out of reach. This is reshaping who gets to buy, what they end up buying, and when they're able to enter the market at all.
Year-to-date, closings are down 3.49% compared to 2025, and the year-to-date median price of $599,990 is up just 0.17%. On paper, that looks like calm, steady stability.
But that "stability" is really just an average and a blend of very different individual experiences. Some sellers are negotiating hard to get a deal done. Others are fielding multiple offers. Some buyers are waiting months for the right home. Others are closing in a matter of weeks.
For some potential buyers, renting is still the smarter, more accessible move right now. For sellers, success looks different depending on the type of home, the neighborhood, and circumstances that a median price or a days-on-market number simply can't capture.
