San Antonio homes sold at 2,333 in July, down from 2,829 in June and 2,669 a year earlier, a 12.6% year-over-year drop that made it the largest home-sales decline among the nation's major metros. Homes also sat on the market for 87 days on average, five days longer than in June and three days longer than in July 2025, as the city's once red-hot pandemic-era market keeps cooling into something that looks a lot more like a buyer's market.
The numbers come from a report by Redfin, first detailed locally by the San Antonio Express-News. San Antonio's slide was steeper than declines in several other Texas metros that also struggled in July, including a 10% drop in Dallas, a 9.9% drop in Fort Worth, and a 9.1% drop in Seattle. Detroit posted the next-largest decline nationally at 9.3%.
Inventory Piles Up as Sellers Sit Tight
Even as sales cratered, San Antonio's housing inventory climbed past six months in July — a level widely considered a typical balance between buyers and sellers, according to the same Redfin data. New listings actually declined 7.6% compared with July 2025, with only 3,483 hitting the market, marking the third-largest new-listings decline in the country. That combination suggests would-be sellers are opting to stay on the sidelines amid the slowdown rather than list into a market where deals are getting harder to close.
Meanwhile, San Antonio's median home sale price still rose 3.3% to $320,243 in July, even as sales volume collapsed — a sign that price softening hasn't caught up with the drop in demand. Redfin ranked San Antonio the fifth-strongest buyer's market in the nation in May, when the city had 108% more sellers than buyers. Redfin's head of economics research, Chen Zhao, said the broader housing market suffered from a mid-summer slump in July as buyers faced record-high home prices, increasing mortgage rates and growing financial insecurity.
Years of New Construction Now Compete With Resale Sellers
San Antonio's slump didn't happen in a vacuum. The metro ranked 10th nationally for new home construction and 4th for new-build home sales as of a May 2026 report by ConsumerAffairs, with builders issuing 1,815 new permits and selling 1,685 new homes in early 2026 alone. That volume of new construction now competes directly with resale sellers, and San Antonio home sales are falling behind after years of new homes flooding the market alongside a decline in buyer demand, according to the Express-News report. Nationally, mortgage rates have remained elevated in recent months amid inflation driven by surging oil and energy costs, and rates reaching a 2026 high of 6.69% by early August have further deterred potential buyers already facing historically high housing costs.
The pain wasn't confined to San Antonio. National home sales dropped 4.1% from June to July, reaching their lowest level in nearly two years on a seasonally adjusted basis, per Redfin's national figures. Nationwide, median home prices still climbed 3.2% year-over-year to a record July high of $407,730, even as the pool of active buyers shrank. Redfin called the July decline its largest reported slump in demand.
Buyer's Market Gives Willing Purchasers Leverage
For buyers who can still afford to purchase, the numbers translate into real bargaining power: they may be able to negotiate on price and receive concessions from eager sellers, a dynamic borne out in listing data showing 25.8% of San Antonio-area listings underwent price reductions in July, well above the 20% national rate, according to Realtor.com. Median list prices in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro fell 4.3% year-over-year to $325,000 even as active listings rose 4.7%. Nationally, 14% of home-sale agreements fell through in July — the highest cancellation rate since 2023 — as sellers outnumbered buyers by 51.3%, pushing nearly 80% of major U.S. metros into buyer's-market territory, as reported by Inman.
Not every market moved in the same direction. While Texas metros and Seattle led the country's sales declines, home sales actually surged 17.1% year-over-year in West Palm Beach, 8.5% in San Francisco, and 7% in Milwaukee, driven largely by affluent buyers in tech and coastal regions, Redfin's data show. That divergence underscores that the current housing weakness is concentrated in oversupplied or high-cost markets rather than spread evenly across the country.
Regional Data Tells a Different Story
Zoom out to the broader 20-county South Texas region, though, and the picture flips: the San Antonio Board of Realtors reported that July home sales across its wider MLS footprint actually rose 5% year-over-year to 3,328 closed sales, with a median price of $315,000, as reported by Texas Public Radio. The gap between that figure and Redfin's steep city-core decline comes down to methodology — SABOR's numbers include rural and outer-suburban sales that appear to be buoying the region's overall transaction totals even as the urban core struggles.
State-level research backs up that split. An August report from the Texas Real Estate Research Center found that while overall Texas housing sales gained modest momentum in the first half of 2026, price corrections have been significantly more pronounced in San Antonio and Austin than in Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston, which have moved closer to price stabilization. San Antonio buyers also face a looming local wildcard: city officials have proposed the city's first property tax rate increase in 33 years to offset rising municipal operating costs, with Bexar County's combined effective tax rate already sitting between 2.5% and 2.9%. On the upside, San Antonio ranks as the sixth-least expensive major Texas metro for homeowners insurance, with average annual premiums projected at $3,048 for 2026 compared to statewide averages exceeding $4,000 — a modest financial counterweight for buyers weighing whether now is the time to jump into a market still very much tilted in their favor.
