Homebuyer bidding wars hit a new low in August

The competition to snag a home continues to ease, with August seeing the fewest competing offers so far this year. 

About 58.8% of the home offers by Redfin agents faced competition, a new low for 2021, according to the technology-powered real estate brokerage. 

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This is a decrease from the revised bidding-war rate of 62.1% a month prior and it's well below the "peak of 74.3% in April," according to Redfin.  

The August rate is also lower than the bidding-war rate of 59.4% reported a year ago.  

"While sellers continue to have the upper hand, buying a home has become slightly easier this summer as the country's acute shortage of homes for sale is no longer intensifying and the market has undergone its typical seasonal slowdown," Redfin said. 

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Although sellers are still pricing their homes "very high," buyers aren't biting. 

"A lot of buyers have had enough and are no longer willing to pay the huge premiums they were six months ago," Nicole Dege, a Redfin real estate agent in Orlando, Florida, said. 

Rather than 25 to 30 offers on move-in ready homes in the area, Dege is seeing five to seven. 

"Buyers are getting a bit more selective," she said. "I have one seller who recently put his four-bedroom single-family pool house on the market, but the roof was shot. He had to lower his asking price to $423,000 from $427,000 and agree to spend around $7,000 to replace the roof in order to attract bidders." 

This is a far cry from about six months ago, when the seller "would have easily been able to sell that home as-is without dropping the price," Dege added. 

The area seeing the most bids is Raleigh, North Carolina, which had a bidding-war rate of 86.7% in August. 

Following closely behind are San Francisco and San Jose, California, at 70.7%, and Tucson, Arizona, at 70.5%.