Home sales contracts kept rising for a third straight month in April, and completed sales also inched higher from March, a sign that buyers kept moving even as mortgage rates climbed in recent weeks. Contract signings were 3.2% above last April’s level, while the share of sellers who cut prices fell 1.3 percentage points from a year earlier.

The numbers suggest the spring market was more active than many expected. In Raleigh, North Carolina, buyers were busy and sellers were offering concessions such as paid roof repairs. In Jacksonville, Florida, price cuts fell 5.1 percentage points from a year earlier, while contract signings rose. Miami showed a similar pattern, with price cuts down 4.4 percentage points from a year ago and signings also up.

Jake Krimmel, a market analyst cited in the data, said the shift is not only about more buyers coming back but also about sellers setting asking prices closer to where buyers are willing to pay. That matters because the housing market had spent much of last year dealing with a different problem: contract cancellations and pulled listings jumped, a sign that sellers and buyers were often too far apart on price or terms.

This April looked different in a few key ways. Contract cancellations and pulled listings were back at more seasonally typical levels, completed home sales eked out a small gain from a month earlier, and median list prices per square foot fell. In Philadelphia and nearby suburbs, the share of sellers cutting prices from March to April declined 3.4 percentage points, showing that the easing was not limited to one region. The data from Realtor.com and Redfin point to a market that is still constrained, but less dysfunctional than it was a year ago.

That does not mean buyers have it easy. Brenda Beiser, who has been working in a market with tight supply, said buyers have to work really hard to get a house and that there is very little to choose from. Samantha Gradle described the last six months as really, really nice, adding that she has had buyers get a lot out of sellers very recently. Both comments fit the same picture: buyers have a little more leverage than they did, but not enough to turn the market into a bargain hunt.

The bigger question is how long this can last. Mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, and they have risen sharply in recent weeks amid global concerns about inflation and the Iran War. Krimmel said affordability has already deteriorated some since February and warned that it is going to be a question of when, not if, that starts to eat into housing demand. For now, the 2026 us housing market trends show demand still holding up through spring, even as the cost of borrowing threatens to test it again.

Many of the markets showing fewer price cuts were once pandemic boomtowns, and some have already seen sharp declines from their peaks a few years earlier. That gives the current cooling in price cuts a different feel: not a return to the frenzy, but a market trying to find a workable middle after years of overshooting in both directions.