NEW YORK, NY — Home prices are cooling across much of the country, but the pace is uneven, and some metros are seeing much steeper pullbacks than others. Realtor.com says August brought another month of year-over-year declines in price per square foot, a measure that adjusts for home size and is often used to compare markets more cleanly.
Nationwide, price per square foot fell 1.8% from a year earlier, marking the 10th straight month of annual declines. Median list prices also slipped in three of the four major regions. Sellers appear to be pricing more realistically as higher mortgage rates and shifting supply and demand reshape the market heading into late summer.
Austin, Tampa and Memphis posted the sharpest annual drops in asking prices
Among the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, saw the biggest annual drop in list price per square foot in August at 8.1%. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida, followed with a 5.6% decline, and Memphis, Tennessee-Mississippi-Arkansas, fell 4.1%.
Those were not the only markets under pressure. San Francisco, San Antonio, Denver, Baltimore, San Diego, Orlando and Portland also recorded declines, with Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Oregon-Washington, down 2.4%. Realtor.com said the median list price per square foot fell in 36 of the top 50 metros, showing that the cooling trend reached well beyond a few isolated hotspots.
The median list prices in those three fastest-falling markets still remained high in absolute terms: $450,000 in Austin, $391,950 in Tampa and $299,995 in Memphis. The data suggests that, even where prices are easing, buyers are still facing significant sticker shock in many large metros.
Pandemic-era boomtowns are now giving back part of their gains
Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel said many of the metros showing the biggest drops are the same places that surged during the pandemic housing boom. He said Austin, Tampa, San Antonio and Denver are among the markets that are still working through a normal post-boom adjustment.
Krimmel said those metros also tend to have much more inventory now than they did before the pandemic. That extra supply has shifted leverage away from sellers and made it harder for unrealistic list prices to hold. In his view, the market is correcting after a period when demand, remote work and low borrowing costs pushed prices much higher.
Nationally, active inventory has continued to rise and is approaching levels last seen in late 2019. That broader buildup helps explain why sellers in cooling markets are having to reset expectations to attract a smaller pool of qualified buyers.
San Francisco is falling too, even with tight supply and expensive homes
San Francisco stands out because it is still one of the nation’s most competitive and expensive housing markets, yet price per square foot still fell 3.9% year over year in August. The median listing price there remains $908,700, but that figure is down 5.2% from a year earlier.
The Bay Area also saw active listings fall 16.3% in July 2026 from a year earlier, which suggests the market has tightened even as prices softened. Realtor.com said the change is less about a collapse in values and more about the mix of homes available this year compared with last year.
Krimmel said there are fewer small, expensive homes in the center of the city on the market, and those scarce properties are still selling quickly. At the same time, more larger homes with lower price per square foot are coming up for sale in outer suburbs, which changes the overall pricing picture.
Local tech pressure is changing buyer sentiment around Fremont and Silicon Valley
Compass agent Veronica Peter, who serves the Fremont area on San Francisco’s southeastern edge, said the housing market there is being influenced by shifts in the tech sector. She said many of her clients work in tech-related jobs, including software engineering, data analysis and web development.
Peter said workers are worried about job security as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry. She pointed to “quiet layoffs” at companies including Oracle, Meta, Dell, Microsoft and Amazon, saying that the uncertainty is affecting how people think about buying homes.
She also said a softer stock market has made it harder for some buyers to assemble down payments, especially for households that had counted on tech-stock gains. Even so, she said the market has not crashed; instead, prices have adjusted to where buyers are willing and able to pay today.
Buyers are getting more room to negotiate as rates and inventory reshape the market
Real estate experts say the recent pullbacks may give some relief to buyers who have been squeezed by affordability pressures for years. Lower asking prices can help, especially in metros where homes had become detached from local incomes and borrowing costs stayed high.
Still, the broader picture remains mixed. The Northeast, South and West all posted year-over-year declines in median list prices, while the Midwest was flat. That uneven pattern shows that local inventory, job growth and demand are still shaping each market differently.
Whether the current declines turn into a longer regional shift will depend on local economic momentum and mortgage rates as the fall buying season begins. For now, Realtor.com’s data points to a housing market that is no longer being driven by the same frenzied pricing power that defined the pandemic years.
More on what homes, rents and new builds are doing near you, on RHS Commoner.
