The Housing Market Is More Fragmented Than Ever—Here’s a New Way To Understand the Data

Is it a buyer's market or a seller's market?

That's the first question many people ask when they set out to buy or sell a home, but the answer has rarely been more complicated than it is today.

Nationally, home sales have been stuck at historic lows for three straight years, while home prices remain stuck near record highs, sending mixed signals about whether buyers or sellers sit in the driver's seat.

But hidden underneath the national housing market data, stark differences have emerged among different regions and cities. In fact, in data going back to 2018, the country's major cities have never been more fragmented in terms of buyer-seller balance, according to the Realtor.com® economic research team.

Across the top 50 metros, 26% are currently seller’s markets, 16% are buyer’s markets, 46% are balanced but loosening, and 2% are balanced but tightening.

It means that buying a home today in Chicago, where sellers hold the upper hand, requires a different mindset than house hunting in a buyer's market such as Tampa, FL.

To help bring clarity to such a fragmented market, Realtor.com is launching the Market Clock, a new tool that tracks where housing market conditions stand both nationally and at the local level for major cities.

"A national picture is useful, but when making a real estate decision, the local details are what really matter," says Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale. "The Realtor.com Market Clock was built to make those differences visible at a glance."

The Market Clock is a visual representation of the housing market, organized as a 12-hour clockface that moves from peak seller-leaning conditions, through balanced markets, and into buyer-leaning conditions before turning back again.

At 12 o'clock, conditions heavily favor sellers: Homes sell quickly, competition is fierce, and buyers have limited leverage.

At 3 o'clock, the market is balanced but shifting toward buyers. By 6 o'clock, the market favors buyers: There's more inventory, less urgency, and more room to negotiate.

As the clock reaches 9 o'clock, the market is balanced again but tightening, moving back toward an advantage for sellers.

The Market Clock aims to provide an easy-to-grasp visualization of market conditions, distilling a plethora of data into a simple graphic that homebuyers and sellers can use to better understand which part of the cycle their market is in.

"At a practical level, the Market Clock addresses a question that underlies much of today’s housing debate but is rarely stated directly: What does the housing market actually feel like right now?" says Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel. "Prices, inventory, and sales activity all matter, but none of them on their own capture the lived experience of buyers and sellers navigating a local market."

Krimmel says the Market Clock is built to summarize that experience in a way that is intuitive, comparable across markets, and consistent over time.

What the Market Clock reveals about the shifting housing market

Nationally, the housing market sits at 3 o’clock right now, meaning that it is balanced but heading toward a buyer's market.

However, metro-level readings are all over the clock, and more fragmented than they have ever been in the available data going back to 2018.

A review of Market Clock data over the past eight years traces the full arc of the current housing cycle, revealing just how tight conditions were even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2018, a slim majority of metro areas favored sellers. By December 2019, on the cusp of the pandemic, 48 of the 50 largest markets were classified as either favoring sellers or tightening, indicating a tight national market.

That backdrop helps explain why home prices surged so quickly once the pandemic buying fever took hold. The market was already stretched thin when the crisis emerged, lowering the threshold for the breaking point.

The first real signs of loosening didn’t appear until the sharp interest rate hikes of 2022. By December 2024, half of all markets still leaned toward sellers, while only four—about 8%—favored buyers.

A year later, the picture has shifted markedly. The number of seller’s markets had been cut roughly in half, while buyer’s markets doubled.

The result: a highly fragmented market where conditions vary widely across the country's largest cities, creating potential confusion for consumers attempting to stay on top of the latest trends.

"Consumers and professionals are exposed to more information than ever before, but more data hasn't always meant more clarity for people trying to make one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives," says Hale. "The Market Clock is our attempt to change that—to take the full range of signals we track and translate them into something that reflects what the market actually feels like on the ground."