This article was originally published on Inman.com.
As we approach 2026, Redfin reflects on a watershed year in the history of American real estate. Here’s our list of the ten most important 2025 trends.
1. The Market Shifted Towards Buyers
Since recovering from the Great Recession of 2008, the U.S. housing market has favored sellers. But 2025 has been the year buyers finally stepped back from rising home prices. Comparing sales of the homes listed in the first quarter of 2024 to sales of those listed in the first quarter of 2025, the median number of days that a listing was on the market increased from 47 to 54, a modest but still-significant shift. Prices are now likely growing slower than inflation, which is good not only for first-time home-buyers but also for the industry. The correction in sales volume won’t end until there is a meaningful correction in home prices.
2. Affordability Became a National Political Issue
2025 has also been the year that affordability became a preeminent national issue, leading to sweeping political change from Seattle to New York, and a broad new mandate within the Trump Administration. Of the many goods that Americans struggled to afford, housing was #1. For the first time, the median age of the first-time home-buyer crossed a crucial psychological threshold, 40, meaning Americans will spend more than half our lives chasing the American dream. The good news is that there is now a broad consensus that that has got to change.
3. The Industry Shrugged Off Rule Changes
In March 2024, the National Association of Realtors paid $418 million to settle a Missouri class-action lawsuit on behalf of home-sellers who don’t want to be obliged to pay a commission to the buyer’s agent. The media predicted the “elimination [of] a bedrock of the industry, the standard six-percent sales commission.” Since then, commissions have modestly increased. In restricting agents’ ability to cooperate on commissions, the lawsuit also made it easier for agents to withhold listings from public marketplaces. This gave buyers’ agents the standing to charge more, not less.
4. Goodbye Mom & Pop, Hello Bigger Shops
2025 has been a year of consolidation. Rocket bought Redfin and Mr. Cooper. Compass later entered into an agreement to buy the largest U.S. brokerage, Anywhere. One factor has been a more business-friendly administration, and a second has been a prolonged housing downturn, which has put pressure on companies with smaller balance sheets, especially now that the real estate portals are spending more than half a billion dollars each year in advertising. The rise of AI also favors larger companies with more data. A traditional industry of mortgage lenders and real estate brokers running out of strip malls and home offices now favors larger, more innovative companies.
5. AI-Augmented Real Estate Brokers
After decades of only incremental innovations in how people search for a home, 2025 was the year that artificial intelligence broke through. AI suggested new neighborhoods for home-buyers to explore or how much to offer on a home and created search experiences that feel like a conversation. AI gave portals the power to improve not just the initial home search, but also the actual service delivered by the real estate brokers affiliated with those sites. A site like Redfin or Zillow now prompts agents to follow-up with a client who gave up on her search and came back again, or who have started looking at the same listing repeatedly. Portals that have accounted for nearly 100% of online searches but whose brokers have handled less than 10% of all U.S. home sales are finally extending their reach into the transaction itself.
6. The 1099 Economy Came Under Pressure
Pandemic-era stimulus checks gave many Americans the reserves to strike out on their own as a real estate agent, to the point that, starting in 2021, the number of U.S. Realtors exceeded the number of homes for sale. But as 2025 came to a close, it became clear that the government’s health-insurance subsidies for gig workers were coming to an end. Many real estate agents get insurance through their spouse, but others are now contemplating alternative careers.
7. Peak Texas
A decade ago, this blog predicted a mass migration into Texas. From 2018 – 2022, home prices in a boom town like Austin increased more than 50%. Since then, prices have fallen by nearly 20%. In 2025, people looking for low home prices and low taxes moved to the Midwest, not Texas or Florida.
8. The Fed Fought for Independence
2025 will be remembered as the year that the Federal Reserve fought for and maintained its independence, keeping mortgage rates above six percent longer than many expected. The short-term impact was fewer home sales. The long-term impact of a more credible Fed is lower inflation, and less housing-market volatility.
9. YIMBYism Became a Broader Political Movement
The yes-in-my-backyard movement that began in order to support more home construction became a broader political idea in 2025. The leader of the effort to reform America’s left wing from within, Ezra Klein, published his book Abundance in March of this year, arguing that American progressives need to set aside regulations in order to build infrastructure well beyond homes, like mass transit and next-generation power plants.
10. Lawfare: The Hundred Years’ War
The rise of real estate superpowers has led to a new competitive front in an industry that has long prided itself on handling its own disputes through negotiation and collaboration. Lawsuits between CoStar, Zillow and others are the new norm, in battles that are likely to last years, not months. Industry titans that once deferred to the National Association of Realtors’ lobbying efforts now employ their own government-affairs teams. Once an industry starts fighting this way, it rarely stops.
