Price Cuts Creep Back Up as Summer Selling Season Stalls

After a strong spring and promising early summer, July saw homebuying stagnate as a result of rising borrowing costs, forcing sellers to slash prices to revive demand.The share of listings with a price cut reached 20% in July, nearly even with last year's levels, after running close to 2 percentage points lower throughout spring, according to the latest Realtor.com® housing market trends report released on Monday.For the first six months of the year, the dominant theme of the national housing market was sellers pricing realistically from the outset to meet buyers where they are to avoid listings going stale.By the end of June, the share of for-sale homes across the U.S. with price cuts was 1.9 percentage points lower than the prior year.However, as summer entered its peak, price cuts picked up as vacationing would-be buyers pulled back and aging listings piled up on the market. "We are seeing the housing market run up against some headwinds, especially on the mortgage rate front, at the exact time when buyer demand starts to dip seasonally," says Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel. "So while the realistic pricing narrative is still there, the story has weakened a bit recentl...