Twenty-one percent of 2025 home sales went to first-time buyers, according to the National Association of Realtors’ newest buyer profile, released this past November, the lowest share NAR has ever recorded and roughly half of what it was in 2007. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old, an all-time high, and put down a median 10 percent, the largest first-timers have managed since 1989. Those figures are the aggregate version of a much more specific story: households writing five, six, seven offers before one finally sticks, watching properties slip away to buyers with deeper pockets or fewer conditions attached. The bidding war has simply gotten more particular about who it lets win.
Where the Competition Still Lives
Nationally, the market has loosened. Redfin’s early-September report found new listings at their highest point in four years and pending sales at their lowest since February, which typically hands buyers more leverage. Yet in the four weeks ending August 30, 2026, 25.9 percent of homes that sold still went for more than list price, up slightly from 25 percent the period before, and the average sale still closed at 98.7 percent of asking. Sellers in the right listings are still doing fine; the market has really split in two. Redfin’s data shows San Francisco home prices climbing 9 percent year over year and West Palm Beach up 8.1 percent, both driven by affluent buyers chasing a thin supply of move-in-ready listings, while Austin fell 7.1 percent and Seattle 6.2 percent over the same stretch. A buyer’s experience now depends enormously on which of those markets, and which price tier within it, they happen to be shopping in.
The Spring Bidding Wars Were Already Cooling
The softening showed up even earlier in the year. Inman’s reporting on Redfin’s spring figures found that just 26.4 percent of homes sold above list price as of early May, the lowest share for that time of year in at least five years. The average sale-to-list ratio had slipped to 98.7 percent from 99 percent a year earlier, homes were sitting on the market 43 days, three more than the prior year, and nearly one in five active listings carried a price cut. Pending sales were still up 7.7 percent year over year, helped along by mortgage rates easing to roughly 6.23 percent, but Redfin’s own analysts cautioned that the jump looked more like a delayed spring market catching up than a lasting shift back toward buyers.
What Actually Wins a Bidding War
For buyers who do land in a genuine multiple-offer situation, the most detailed public data on what tips the scale still comes from Redfin’s analysis of offers its agents wrote. An all-cash offer nearly quadrupled a buyer’s odds of winning, a 290 percent improvement over a financed offer with no other advantages, by far the single most powerful lever measured. Waiving the financing contingency came in a distant second, improving a buyer’s odds by 66 percent. Notably, three tactics that buyers are often coached to use showed no measurable benefit at all: escalation clauses, waived inspection contingencies, and pre-offer inspections. Redfin’s agents attributed that to saturation: so many competing buyers already use those moves in hot markets that the tactics stop functioning as a differentiator and simply become the price of entry.
Who First-Time Buyers Are Actually Competing Against
Part of what makes today’s field so lopsided is who else is bidding. NAR’s buyer profile found that repeat buyers now make up 79 percent of all home purchases, and 30 percent of them pay entirely in cash, a pool of competition with no mortgage approval to wait on and no appraisal gap to worry about. Sellers, meanwhile, are staying put longer than ever: a median of 11 years in their homes before listing, another record, which is part of why inventory has stayed tight in the neighborhoods buyers want most. First-time buyers scraping together a down payment are doing it mostly the hard way: 59 percent draw on personal savings, 26 percent tap retirement or investment accounts, and 22 percent lean on a gift or loan from family, per NAR’s survey of more than 6,100 recent buyers.
The Practical Takeaway
Put together, the data points toward a narrower and less glamorous playbook than the internet’s bidding-war folklore suggests. Cash and a waived financing contingency move the needle; escalation clauses and inspection waivers mostly do not anymore, because everyone already offers them. And geography matters as much as tactics: a buyer losing repeatedly in San Francisco or West Palm Beach is fighting a fundamentally different market than one losing in Austin or Seattle, where price cuts and longer days on market suggest patience is starting to pay off instead. With new listings at a four-year high nationally, the buyers still losing bidding war after bidding war in the hottest pockets may be better served waiting a few weeks for a softer listing than escalating further into a shrinking slice of homes that were always going to draw a crowd.
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