Nearly half of home sellers, 46.2%, gave buyers some kind of concession in May 2026, the highest share on record for that month, according to Redfin’s own housing data. Covering a buyer’s closing costs has quietly become one of the most common ways sellers get a deal signed at all.
A closing cost concession works like this: instead of lowering the sale price outright, the seller agrees to credit the buyer a set amount of money at closing, which the buyer then uses to cover costs like loan origination fees, title insurance, or prepaid property taxes. On paper the sale price stays the same. In practice, the seller is handing back cash the moment the deal closes.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
Redfin’s data, drawn from its own agents’ transactions nationwide, found that the May 2026 concession rate was up from 43.1% a year earlier. Just as notably, 15.7% of sales in May involved both a concession and a price drop, also the highest share on record for that month, up from 12.8% a year prior. Sellers, in other words, aren’t just choosing between cutting the price or covering closing costs anymore. Increasingly they’re doing both at once.
The trend is sharpest in Sun Belt metros that boomed during the pandemic and have since cooled considerably. In Nashville, 75.5% of home sales in May included a concession, up 13.7 percentage points from a year earlier, the strongest buyer’s market Redfin tracked. Charlotte followed at 71.4%, Atlanta at 68.7%, Phoenix at 65.6%, and Raleigh at 64.1%. On the other end of the spectrum, concessions remain rare in New York (2.9%) and San Jose (5.9%), where housing supply is still tight enough that sellers hold most of the leverage.
photo credit: unsplash
Why Sellers Are Reaching for This Lever
Amanda Peterson, a Redfin Premier agent in Dallas, put it plainly in the company’s own report: “There are two main reasons concessions are so prevalent: Buyers have leverage, and some sellers are pricing too high.”
That leverage shift shows up in the broader numbers, too. Redfin’s data cited roughly 47% more sellers than buyers active in the market as of May, a supply-demand imbalance that gives house hunters far more room to negotiate than they had just a few years ago. Add in mortgage rates and home prices that remain historically elevated, along with broader economic uncertainty, and buyers have both the motivation and the standing to ask for help getting to the closing table.
Rising costs beyond the mortgage payment itself are part of the calculation, too. Higher homeowners insurance premiums and climbing HOA fees, driven in part by increased climate-related risk in many regions, have made the all-in cost of owning a home less predictable than it used to be. A seller willing to cover a few thousand dollars in closing costs can offset some of that sticker shock without having to touch the number that shows up as the official sale price.
Why the Sale Price Matters Less Than It Looks
There’s a reason sellers often prefer a concession to a straightforward price cut: appraisals and comparable sales records are built around the contract price, not the amount that eventually changes hands after credits are applied. Keeping the sticker price intact helps protect the perceived value of neighboring homes and the seller’s own sense of what their property is “really” worth, even as real dollars flow back to the buyer at the closing table.
For buyers, the appeal is just as practical. Closing costs, which typically run somewhere between 2% and 5% of the loan amount, are a cash expense that can’t be rolled into a mortgage payment the way the purchase price can. A seller credit that shrinks or eliminates that upfront bill can be the difference between a buyer qualifying for a purchase and walking away from it entirely.
photo credit: unsplash
A New Normal, at Least for Now
None of this means sellers are giving away their equity. Home prices in most of the country remain well above pre-pandemic levels, and a concession worth a few thousand dollars is often a small fraction of the total sale. What’s changed is the willingness to treat that concession as a routine cost of doing business rather than a sign of desperation.
As long as there are more sellers than buyers competing for attention in markets across the Sun Belt and beyond, covering a chunk of someone’s closing costs looks less like a last resort and more like the price of admission to getting a contract signed at all.
Leave a Reply