A friend forwarded me a Redfin report this week with a headline I’ve been waiting a long time to see: August 2026 was the strongest buyer’s market on record, nationally, in data going back to 2013. And the top ten metros driving it are all in the Sun Belt, with Miami sitting at number two in the country.
I’ve been originating in Broward since 2002, so I’ve worked through a few of these cycles. Headlines like this one are useful, but only if you know what they actually mean at the negotiating table. So here’s the report, what it says about our corner of the state, and what I’m telling clients to do with it.
What Redfin actually measured
Redfin’s method is simple enough to trust. It estimates how many active buyers and active sellers are in each market in a given month, using MLS listings, pending sales, and its own data on how long a buyer typically takes from first tour to closing. More than 10% more sellers than buyers is a buyer’s market; more than 10% fewer is a seller’s market; anything in between is balanced.
The national numbers for August 2026:
- 57.9% more sellers than buyers, the widest gap Redfin has ever recorded. July was 52.1%, which had been the record.
- About 1.53 million sellers in the market, the most since early 2020, up 3.9% in a single month.
- About 972,000 buyers, essentially unchanged from July.
- Home prices across all of the buyer’s markets rose just 1.6% year over year, versus 5.5% in the handful of remaining seller’s markets.
Only five of the fifty largest metros are still seller’s markets, and every one of them is in the Northeast, the Midwest, or the Bay Area. The Sun Belt has swung the other way.
Where South Florida lands
Redfin’s top ten strongest buyer’s markets are all Sun Belt metros, and Florida has two of them:
| Metro | More sellers than buyers | Buyers | Sellers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami | 138.3% (#2 nationally) | 7,939 | 18,916 |
| Orlando | 121.5% (#4) | 8,968 | 19,868 |
| Tampa | 86.4% | 14,384 | 26,813 |
| Jacksonville | 66.9% | 7,284 | 12,157 |
| West Palm Beach | 64.9% | 9,020 | 14,878 |
One honest note before you go looking for Fort Lauderdale on that list: it isn’t there. Redfin excluded the Fort Lauderdale metro this month for insufficient data. Broward sits geographically and economically between Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, and everything I see in my own pipeline says we’re in the same condition: more than two sellers for every buyer in Miami, more than one and a half in Palm Beach, and Broward somewhere in between.
Two other details matter for us. Miami actually cooled slightly from July, when it was at 149%, and West Palm Beach came in from 81% to 65%. Those are still overwhelmingly buyer-favorable numbers, but the direction says the very top of the seller glut may be behind us. And Redfin names the reasons Miami is at the top: rising insurance costs, higher HOA fees, and climate risk have pushed sellers to list and made buyers cautious. Those aren’t going away, which is why I’d expect this market to stay buyer-favorable for a while rather than snapping back.
What a buyer’s market actually buys you
Here is where the headline gets practical. “Buyer’s market” doesn’t mean every home is 20% off. It means the seller needs you more than you need them, and that leverage can be spent five different ways. In my experience the buyers who do best decide which lever matters most to them before they write the offer.
1. Price. The obvious one, and usually not the most valuable. In a market where prices are flat, a seller who has already cut once is more likely to hold the line on price and give elsewhere, because the price is public and the concessions aren’t.
2. Seller concessions toward closing costs. This is the lever I’d reach for first. The seller pays a stated amount of your closing costs and prepaids, written into the contract. On a $450,000 purchase, a 3% concession is $13,500 of cash you don’t bring to closing. The program sets the ceiling: conventional loans allow 3% with less than 10% down, 6% with 10% to 25% down, and 9% above that; FHA loans allow 6%; VA loans let the seller cover all of your standard closing costs plus 4% in true concessions. I broke down exactly what those costs are in last week’s closing costs piece.
3. A seller-paid rate buydown. Instead of using the concession on fees, put it toward the rate. A permanent buydown uses discount points to lower your rate for the life of the loan; a temporary 2-1 buydown lowers your payment for the first two years while you get settled. Both fit inside the same concession caps, and in a flat-price, elevated-rate market this is often the single most valuable thing a seller can give you, because it lowers the payment you’ll live with every month.
4. Repairs and credits. Sellers who would have said “as is” eighteen months ago are now fixing roofs, replacing water heaters, and crediting for the electrical panel. Get the inspection, don’t waive it, and negotiate from the report.
5. Time and terms. Longer inspection periods, a financing contingency that actually protects you, a closing date that fits your lease, and the chance to actually think for a weekend. In 2021 buyers gave all of that away to compete. Take it back.
The condo market is where this is deepest
If you’re shopping condos anywhere from Hallandale to Deerfield, the buyer’s market is even stronger than the metro numbers suggest. Insurance costs, rising HOA dues, and the post-Surfside reserve and inspection requirements have thinned the condo buyer pool dramatically, and a lot of owners who were waiting for a recovery are listing instead.
That creates real bargains, and it creates a specific trap: the building is the deal, not just the unit. A discounted price on a unit in a building with an unfunded special assessment coming is not a discount. A building that fails the lender’s questionnaire on reserves, litigation, or owner-occupancy is non-warrantable, which closes off standard conventional financing entirely. That’s the single most common file I close, and the fix is to get the condo financing reviewed at the same time as the inspection, not after. Ask the seller for the condo questionnaire, the budget, and the reserve study up front. In this market, they’ll give it to you.
Don’t overplay the hand
Redfin’s senior economist Asad Khan put the caveat well: today’s buyers can afford to be choosy and should negotiate on price and ask for concessions, but they “shouldn’t assume every seller will budge, especially on a desirable home that’s already priced well.”
I see this weekly. A well-priced waterfront home in Lighthouse Point or a renovated single-family in Coral Springs still draws multiple offers, buyer’s market or not, because the buyers who are still active are serious and there aren’t many such listings. The leverage is on the listings that have sat. Read the days on market and the price-reduction history before you decide how aggressive to be, and don’t lose the right house over a lowball that was never going to land.
Why your pre-approval matters more in a buyer’s market, not less
This seems backwards, so let me explain. When a seller has one offer instead of six, they don’t stop caring about certainty; they care about it more, because if your financing falls through they’re back on the market with a stale listing. A real pre-approval, with income and assets actually reviewed rather than a website pop-up, is what lets you ask for concessions and repairs and still be the offer the seller trusts to close. It also tells you, before you negotiate, exactly how much concession your loan program allows, so you don’t leave money on the table or write an offer that underwriting has to unwind.
What about rates?
The rate snapshot at the top of this page is live, so I won’t quote a number that will be stale by the time you read this. The point stands regardless of where it sits: rates and prices don’t move together on a schedule. If you buy now with a seller concession, a buydown, and a repaired roof, and rates fall next year, you refinance and keep every one of those wins. If you wait for rates to fall first, you’ll be competing with the buyers who also waited, and the leverage in this report goes away.
I’m not telling anyone the market has bottomed; nobody knows that. I’m telling you that the strongest buyer’s market on record, with Miami at the top of the list, is a rare setup for anyone who was going to buy in the next year anyway. If that’s you, the first step is a fifteen-minute scenario conversation so you know what you qualify for and what you can ask a seller to cover. Get pre-approved with James and let’s structure the offer before you write it.
Source: Redfin, “It’s Now the Strongest Buyer’s Market on Record, Driven by the Sun Belt,” published September 10, 2026. Figures are Redfin’s August 2026 estimates for the 50 largest U.S. metros.