Buyers nationally have more negotiating power right now than they’ve had in years. Whether any individual buyer gets to use it depends almost entirely on a decision they made weeks earlier.
🔴 The market has tilted toward buyers, and the data is no longer ambiguous
Redfin’s July numbers show the number of homebuyers in the market dropped to a record low, with a near-record 51% more sellers than buyers.
Sellers are competing for buyers. That shows up as room on price, credits, repairs, timing and contingencies.
Here’s what most buyers don’t think about: a market like this changes what you need from an agent.
In a seller’s market, a mediocre agent and an outstanding one produce fairly similar outcomes — neither has much room to work with. Write strong, waive what you can stomach, hope. There isn’t much strategy available.
In this increasingly buyers’ market, the gap between them is enormous. And it’s measured in credits, repairs and price reductions you either got or never heard about.
💡 What this actually means for buyers:
Leverage isn’t a gift. It’s an opening, and someone has to walk through it on your behalf.
Leverage is hyperlocal. July contract cancellation rates ran 3.5% in Nassau County, New York, and 4.1% in San Francisco, against 14% nationally. Your block may look nothing like the headline.
The agent who was fine for your friend in 2022 was operating in a completely different job.
🎯 Bottom line: The market changed the job description. Most buyers are still hiring against the old one.
🔴 What “hiring to meet the moment” actually requires
Nationally, 14% of home-sale agreements that went under contract in July fell through — the highest share in nearly three years. Before anyone panics: that figure has moved between roughly 13% and 14% for four straight years. This isn’t a collapse.
But the reasons are instructive. A Redfin agent in Orlando described buyers getting anxious before the inspection, going back to their lender, sitting with the payment, and never sending the deposit. Or a modest inspection finding escalating into a demand for major concessions — or a walk.
Neither of those buyers did anything wrong. Both were sent into the strongest negotiating market in years without the preparation to use it effectively.
So here is the standard. Three things this market requires that the last one didn’t:
1. Your real payment, modeled before the offer — not after.
Taxes, insurance, HOA, assessments. A buyer discovering after they’re in contract that the number frightens them wasn’t walked through it beforehand. That’s not cold feet. That’s a gap in preparation.
2. The ability to read leverage on your specific block.
Not the national number. Your price band, your neighborhood, this seller’s motivation and days on market. An agent who can only describe market conditions cannot convert them.
3. Inspection findings treated as a negotiation, not a referendum.
An agent with range produces a credit. An agent without it produces a fight or a walk. Walking away is sometimes exactly right — the question is whether you walked because it was the correct call or because nobody built you an alternative.
💡 What this actually means for buyers:
These are answerable questions. You can ask any agent to walk you through how they’d handle each one — before you sign anything.
An agent who deflects to reassurance instead of specifics is telling you something.
You will not be able to evaluate any of this against a single candidate. You need something to compare it to.
🎯 Bottom line: The waste in this market isn’t happening in the negotiation. It happens at the hire — weeks earlier, when a buyer picks the first agent who is friendly and available, and never finds out whether that person can operate in a market like this one.
Not sure what to even ask an agent?
My free Buyer Agent Interview Blueprint gives you one question for each of the Five Dimensions of Outstanding Buyer Representation™ — plus four trick questions that reveal how an agent thinks under pressure.
Free → HireForwardBlueprint.com
📋 FROM THE HIRE:FORWARD™ DESK
The uncomfortable part of a buyers’ market is that it puts a spotlight on your agent hire.
When conditions are tight, weak representation hides. Everyone loses the same bidding wars, and no one can tell the difference between an agent who ran out of options and an agent who never had any. When conditions loosen, the difference becomes visible — except to the buyer, who never sees the credit that wasn’t requested or the reduction that was available.
That’s The Downstream Effect™. The cost of a weak hire almost never shows up at hiring time. It shows up in negotiation, in inspection, in the moments when the transaction gets hard.
Which is why your agent interview matters more than any rapport you feel with that agent.
My Buyer Agent Interview Blueprint is the condensed version of the full Hire:Forward™ interview system, and it’s free. Inside:
One strong question for each of the Five Dimensions of Outstanding Buyer Representation™ — and what the answers actually reveal
Five Foundational Fit questions that establish baseline competence before you get anywhere near the deeper material
Four trick questions built to expose how an agent thinks under pressure
The interview process itself: three candidates, one day, the same questions — so you have something tangible to compare
That last piece is the one that matters most in this market. Everything in this issue — the payment modeled before the offer, the read on your specific block, the inspection finding handled as a negotiation — is impossible to judge against a single candidate. You need a second and third answer before the first one means anything. Read more about the Comparison Imperative™ here.
Hire:Forward — providing homebuyer resources built for buyers, not the industry.