Redfin Report Finds Homebuyer Competition Cooled in August As Market Rebalances

SEATTLE, Sept. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage, today released its August 2013 Real-Time Bidding War Report based on Offer Insights, statistics compiled from thousands of offers written each month by Redfin agents for their home-buying clients.

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In August, 60.5 percent of offers Redfin agents wrote faced bidding wars, down from 63.3 percent in July and from 63.5 percent in August 2012. This was the fifth month in a row that Redfin reported a month-over-month drop in competition but was the first year-over-year drop in competition seen since the brokerage began collecting this data in 2011. As Redfin analysts and agents predicted once mortgage rates began to rise early in the summer, the falling bidding war rates signal a shift from market that was firmly in the seller's territory toward a more balanced market.

The report's key findings include:

• Competition declined most dramatically in Baltimore, with a drop from 50% of Redfin offers facing competition in July to just 29.8% in August.
• Nationally, the average difference between Redfin's winning offers and asking prices fell below zero (to -0.3%). Only San Francisco and Seattle had offers higher on average than asking prices, with 7.2% and 0.2% respectively.
• From July to August, all-cash offers grew in popularity as a winning strategy in San Francisco (climbing from 4.0% of offers in July to 11.5% in August), San Diego (3.2% to 15.8%), Washington, DC (4.7% to 10.5%) and Seattle (3.2% to 12.5%).
• Pre-inspections were not used in any of Redfin's competitive offers in August. They had been a popular competitive strategy in Seattle, Baltimore, and Washington, DC in each of the several months prior.
• While the national market became less competitive, bidding wars picked up in San Francisco and Orange County, CA, with 4.2 and  3.6 month-over-month percentage point increases, respectively.
• San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston were the only cities that experienced a more competitive August market this year than last year. In all the other metro areas covered, competition for homes declined year over year.

The table below ranks the hottest real estate markets in order of competitiveness.

To read the full report on Redfin's blog, complete with accounts of real bidding wars from Redfin agents and market-by-market statistics on offer strategies, click the following link. http://www.redfin.com/research/reports/real-time-bidding-wars.

About Redfin
Redfin (www.redfin.com) is a technology-powered real estate broker that represents people buying and selling homes. Founded and run by technologists, Redfin, has a team of experienced, full-service real estate agents who are advocates, not sales-people, earning customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions. Redfin's online tools feature all the broker-listed homes for sale, as well as for-sale-by-owner properties that don't pay brokers a commission. The company serves 22 U.S. markets, and has closed more than $8 billion in home sales. In 2012, Redfin was named one of The DIGITAL 100: World's Most Valuable Private Tech Companies by Business Insider. Follow us on blog.redfin.com, on Twitter @Redfin, and Facebook.com/Redfin.

SOURCE Redfin