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Housing Market 2024: It Takes the Longest To Sell a Home in These 10 US Metros

March 21, 2024

4 min Read

Written by David Nadelle

Edited by Nicholas Morine

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Slowing housing markets in many parts of the U.S. are pushing some home sellers to make hard-fought concessions on price — or delay their plans to sell until next year — in the wake of higher rates. Meanwhile, fewer buyers are qualifying for mortgages, and those with mortgages are struggling to meet monthly payments.

The market has changed dramatically over the past 5 years, and in 2023, everyone affected by housing ups and downs was feeling the stress.

With sellers’ negotiating power diminished since the days of high demand, and many buyers not willing to negotiate whatsoever, some U.S. markets are seeing houses sit for unusually long periods of time before selling.

The Fastest- and Slowest-Selling Housing Markets in 2024

According to Creditnews Research, finding a buyer for a home in some southern metro areas can take over two months. The independent research house analyzed the top 100 largest metros in the U.S. by population, using Zillow data to figure the number of days before a listing goes into sale-pending status. It also compared how these rankings have evolved since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seven of the top 10 slowest-selling metro areas are located in the South — three each in Texas and Florida, plus one in Louisiana. Austin was found to be the slowest-selling metro area in the U.S., taking 66 days for a home listing to reach sale-pending status.

In contrast, the fastest-selling metro areas are all on the East Coast, primarily in Connecticut (the fastest-selling metro area in the U.S. is Hartford), New York (Rochester, Syracuse) and Massachusetts (Boston, Worcester).

Correlation Between Housing Inventory and Selling Pace Since the Pandemic

While the worst of the pandemic appears to be over, its effects linger — and changed the housing markets in certain cities more than others. All of the top 10 fastest-selling metro areas lost a significant amount of housing inventory per capita since the beginning of the pandemic, so houses there are scarcer.

The fallout was less severe in those areas identified as slow-selling. The median days-to-pending increased compared to pre-pandemic levels in five metros, four recorded a decline and one remained unchanged.

Between January 2020 and January 2024, Austin saw its median listing time jump from 23 to 66 days, a 186.96% change. Additionally, the Creditnews Research study found that housing inventory has increased 29.32% in the state capital as compared to before the pandemic began.