Buyers Are Quitting. Reno Just Has a Different Problem.
by Ben Florsheim | August 2026
Hi friends. Madison has found her voice. She spends most of the day narrating something to us in a language that is entirely her own, and she is very serious about it. Long sentences. Real conviction. Erica and I nod along like we understand every word.
She is also into absolutely everything now. She crawls straight for whatever room she is not supposed to be in, pulls herself up on the couch, and then looks back at me like she is daring me to say something about it. Lately she has started letting go of the table for half a second at a time. Any day now I am going to look up and catch her first steps. I keep my phone close by just in case.
I have some news of my own this month. I have joined the Mohan Group, and I am officially a Nevada Broker. That took years of transactions, a pile of coursework, and a state exam to get to. What it means for you is more flexibility. I have more room to structure a deal around your situation instead of squeezing your situation into a standard form. If you are not totally sure what any of that means, that is a perfect excuse for us to grab a coffee. I would genuinely enjoy walking you through it.
Which brings me to the market, because “your situation is not standard” is becoming the theme of this whole year. The national numbers that came out in August were rough. Our numbers here were not. Let me show you both, honestly.
American Buyers Are Walking Away
Here is the number that stopped me cold. In July there were more people trying to sell a home in this country than there were people trying to buy one, and it was not close.
- About 966,752 active homebuyers nationally, the lowest count on record
- About 1,462,921 active sellers, which is roughly 51% more sellers than buyers
- That gap is the second widest ever recorded, behind only December 2025
- Around 80% of major U.S. metros are now buyer’s markets
Read that again. Sellers outnumber buyers by half a million people. In Miami, sellers outnumber buyers by 154%. That is not a soft patch, that is a buyer strike.
Active U.S. buyers versus sellers. The lines crossed in 2022 and never came back. Source: Redfin and MLS data, via The Kobeissi Letter.
The rest of the data agrees. The Pending Home Sales Index, which tracks contracts signed and is the best early read we have on where sales are heading, fell again in July to 71.2. That is the second lowest reading on record. It is down about 36% from July 2021 and still sits roughly a third below where it was before the pandemic. All four regions of the country fell.
And the West got hit hardest. Pending sales out here dropped 7.7% in a single month to an all time low, now about 47% below the July 2021 level. New home sales slipped too, falling back under 600,000 on an annualized basis after builders had been holding the line most of the year.
U.S. Pending Home Sales Index, 1980 through July 2026. We are near the bottom of the whole chart. Source: Bloomberg, via Kevin Gordon at Charles Schwab.
Why It Is Happening, and the Fed Whiplash in August
It is the rate, mostly. The 30 year fixed averaged 6.66% at the end of August. A year ago it was 6.56%. So after twelve months of headlines about rate cuts, we ended up slightly worse off than where we started. Buyers who have been patiently waiting for the number to break have now been waiting a very long time, and a lot of them just quit.
August itself was a whipsaw. The July inflation report came in cooler than expected, with headline inflation at 3.4% and core at 2.5%, and suddenly the odds of a Fed rate hike in September dropped hard. Then Chair Kevin Warsh spoke at Jackson Hole at the end of the month and sounded hawkish again, and the odds jumped right back up. Markets now put a September hike at somewhere around a coin flip to two thirds likely, depending on the day you look.
My honest opinion has not changed, and this month made me more confident in it. Stop waiting on the Fed. Nobody at the Fed knows what the Fed is doing next month, and that includes the people who vote. If you build your life around a rate forecast, you are building on sand. Build around a payment you can actually live with, and refinance later if the gift shows up.
Now the Reno and Sparks Part
Here is August at home, single family homes, straight from our MLS.
Reno:
- Median sale price of $605,000, up about 9.7% from a year ago
- Average of 73 days on market, down from 80 a year ago
- 1,268 homes for sale at the end of the month, down about 20% from a year ago
- 301 homes sold, down about 7% from a year ago
Sparks:
- Median sale price of $530,800, down about 2.6% from a year ago
- Average of 67 days on market, down from 74 a year ago
- 524 homes for sale, down about 17% from a year ago
- 130 homes sold, down about 8% from a year ago
So here is the honest read, and it is not what you would guess from the national headlines. The reason Reno does not look like Miami is not that our buyers are stronger. Our buyers pulled back too. Sales are down here just like everywhere else. The difference is that our sellers never flooded in. Inventory is down about 20% in Reno and 17% in Sparks compared to last August.
That is the whole story in one sentence. Nationally, a wave of sellers hit a market with no buyers, and prices are under pressure. Here, both sides stepped back at roughly the same time, so the market got quieter without getting ugly. We are sitting at about 4.2 months of supply in Reno and 4.0 in Sparks, which is close to textbook balanced.
I do want to put a caveat on that Reno price number, because I would rather you hear it from me than find out later. When only 301 homes sell in a month, the median moves around a lot. Reno being up almost 10% does not mean your specific house is worth 10% more than it was last August. Sparks, which has a more consistent mix of homes, actually went the other direction and finished down about 2.6%. My read on the truth is that we are flat to modestly up in Reno and flat to slightly soft in Sparks. Solid, but softening. That is a far cry from the rest of the West, and it is also not a boom.
What That Actually Looked Like on My Desk
Two deals this month tell the story better than the stats do.
The first was a family moving up to a bigger home. In a hot market, a move up buyer takes what they can get and feels lucky. Not this time. We negotiated, we took our time, and between the price reduction and seller concessions we brought home about $22,000 for them. That is a real number. That is money in their pocket at the closing table because we were patient and the seller needed a buyer more than we needed that house. That leverage exists right now, and most buyers are not using it.
The second was a first time buyer purchasing a home in Palm Springs, California. Which is a good moment to mention something a lot of you may not know. I am licensed in both Nevada and California. So if you have a kid heading to school in California, a parent retiring down there, or you are eyeing a place in the desert or on the coast, you do not need to go find a stranger. Call me first.
If you are buying right now, this is the most negotiating room you have had in years. Sellers are agreeing to closing cost help and rate buydowns that would have gotten you laughed out of the room in 2021. But you only get that if you are pre approved and actually out looking. You cannot negotiate from the sidelines.
If you are selling, your home is still worth good money and it will still sell. But buyers are patient and picky, and they have a calculator. Price it right on day one and make it show well, and it moves in about two months. Come in high hoping someone falls in love, and you will be reducing in three weeks and taking less than if you had just priced it correctly. The first two weeks decide everything.
Around Reno
The Great Reno Balloon Race is next week, September 10 through 13 at Rancho San Rafael Park. It expanded to four days this year. Set an alarm and go see the Glow Show and Dawn Patrol before sunrise at least once in your life. It is free, and it is one of the genuinely magical things about living here.
Street Vibrations Fall Rally rolls in September 24 through 26. Downtown fills up with motorcycles, live music and vendors, and the whole city gets a little louder for a weekend. If you love it, you love it. If you do not, now you know which weekend to plan around.
Out at the airport, the MoreRNO concourse project keeps moving. They broke ground in March on a full replacement of the A and B concourses, built to handle around 5.5 million passengers a year by 2032. That is roughly 40% growth. Airports do not build for growth they do not expect, and that is a quiet vote of confidence in this region that I do not think gets talked about enough.
And in Sparks, construction started this summer on a 180,000 square foot advanced manufacturing facility off Pyramid Highway near Spanish Springs. It is expected to bring around 70 engineering and skilled technician jobs and be running in early 2027. It is not a headline grabber, but this is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a real floor under our housing market. Jobs move here, then people move here.
Let’s Talk
That is the month from where I sit. The country has a buyer problem. We have a quieter market with fewer sellers and more room to negotiate, which is a much better problem to have. If any of this has you thinking about a move, or you want me to run real numbers on your specific situation, or you just want to hear what this broker thing means over a cup of coffee, I would love to hear from you. Hit reply to this email, give me a call, or let’s grab that coffee. No pressure and no sales pitch. Just a real conversation.
Ben Florsheim
The Mohan Group | Northern Nevada
ben@sellinreno.com