Homes Are Selling Below Asking Again. That Changes What Agents Need From a TC.

New data from Redfin, reported by CNBC, shows homes sold below asking price in 38 of the 50 largest US housing markets in June. Nationally, only about 25% of homes are selling above asking now, down from roughly 55% at the 2022 pandemic peak. That's a real shift in leverage, and it changes what agents need from the people who help them close.

The Redfin Data

The biggest average discounts were concentrated in Florida and Texas: Miami at 4.66% below asking, West Palm Beach at 4.59%, Houston at 3.53%, Austin at 3.17%, with Tampa, Dallas, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, and Orlando rounding out the top ten, all between roughly 2.5% and 3%. San Francisco, New York, and Boston are the exceptions, with homes there still selling slightly above asking on average.

Redfin's chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, points to a lag: buyers feel higher borrowing costs immediately, but sellers take longer to adjust their price expectations to match. In Florida and Texas specifically, a pandemic-era building surge gave buyers more options, while rising insurance and property tax costs have shrunk the buyer pool and added pressure on sellers to negotiate.

Negotiation Complexity

A below-asking market isn't just a lower final number. It's more negotiated terms per file: price reductions during escrow, closing cost credits, repair credits after inspection, sometimes multiple rounds of counters before a deal holds. Each of those is a term that has to be captured correctly, tracked against a deadline, and reflected accurately in every document that follows.

That's a meaningfully heavier file than a multiple-offer, above-asking deal where the terms were mostly settled before the contract was signed. More negotiated terms means more chances for something to get missed, whether that's a repair credit that doesn't make it into closing figures or a price reduction that isn't reflected in a document sent to the lender.

Agent Differentiation

One real estate broker quoted in the CNBC piece put it simply: pricing actually matters again. In a market where sellers can't just name a number and wait for multiple offers, agents are competing harder for both listings and buyer clients, and execution quality becomes part of the pitch, not just an assumption.

An agent whose transactions run cleanly through a more complicated negotiation, with nothing dropped and every update landing on time, has a real edge over one whose files are a mess of missed credits and confused clients. In a market where the easy wins are gone, that edge is worth more than it was two years ago.

White-Glove Service

This is where a TC's execution becomes the differentiator an agent can actually point to. Every negotiated term captured accurately the first time. Every credit and price adjustment reflected correctly across the file. Client updates that go out proactively instead of after someone calls asking where things stand.

Freehold's contract extraction reads a negotiated contract, including amendments and counters, and populates the transaction record without manual re-entry, so a repair credit added in week three doesn't get lost between the inspection report and the closing statement. The client portal keeps both sides of the deal, and the co-op agent, current in real time, so nobody's chasing a status update mid-negotiation. That's the difference between a TC who executes and one who's just keeping up.

Positioning to Agents

This is a genuinely good moment for a TC to make this pitch directly, not wait for an agent to notice on their own. Files are getting more complicated, and agents who are already feeling that complexity are receptive to hearing how you handle it differently: fewer missed terms, faster updates, a client experience that holds up even when the deal itself required three rounds of negotiation.

That pitch lands better with the agent on the other side of a file too, the one covered in an earlier post on this blog: someone who's watched your execution firsthand on a genuinely complicated deal has more reason to want you on their next one than someone who's only heard about your reviews.

Summary

A below-asking market means more negotiated terms per file, and more reason for agents to care about who's executing behind the scenes. That's an opening, not a threat: the TCs who can demonstrate clean execution on complicated files right now are the ones who'll be remembered when the market eventually turns again.