The National Housing Market Is Cooling Off. Cincinnati Isn't.

If you've read a housing headline this summer, you've seen some version of the same story: buyers have cold feet, sellers are cutting prices, the market is slowing down. That story is true. It's just not true here, in Cincinnati. 

I pulled the July numbers for Greater Cincinnati and lined them up against the national data. Here's what's actually happening, in plain English.

What "cooling off" looks like nationally

Sellers started cutting their asking prices. The typical home listed nationally was priced at $428,950 — down 2.4% from a year ago, according to Realtor.com. By the square foot, asking prices were down 2.0%. One in five homes on the market had already taken a price cut.

Sales slowed. Existing home sales fell 1.7% from June to July, landing at an annual pace of 4.06 million homes — essentially flat against last year.

Price growth has nearly stopped, and after inflation it's negative. The Case-Shiller index, the most widely watched measure of what homes are worth over time, had national values up just 1.1% for the year through May — and down 2.1% once you adjust for inflation. The typical American homeowner's house gained little in equity and lost ground in buying power, due to higher interest rates. 

Borrowing got more expensive. The 30-year fixed rate hit 6.67% in mid-August, its highest in a year.

Add it up and you get the market most of the country is living in. Homes sit longer. Sellers have to make price drops. Buyers have more room to negotiate than they've had in years.

What July actually looked like here

1,622 single-family homes sold across Hamilton, Butler, Warren, and Clermont — up 5.9% from last July. Condos sold 229 units, up 11.2%. National sales were flat; ours grew.

The typical single-family home sold in 8 days. Not eight weeks. Eight days. The national median is 29 days.

Our year-to-date median of $340,000 is up 4.6% over last year — while national asking prices fell 2.4%. We're moving the opposite direction, not just at a different speed.

And it isn't because nothing was for sale. We had 2,595 homes on the market, up 2.7% from a year ago, plus 2,263 new listings in July alone. More homes came available and buyers absorbed them anyway. In most of the country this year, rising inventory has meant softening prices. Here it hasn't.

The one number that explains the rest

Months of supply answers a simple question: if not one more house came on the market starting tomorrow, how long would it take to sell everything currently for sale? Nationally, 4.6 months. In Greater Cincinnati, about 1.6 months.

The country has a four-and-a-half-month cushion of unsold homes. We have roughly six weeks' worth. Under about three months, there are more buyers than available homes and sellers set the terms — a seller's market. Above six months, buyers do. Most of the country is drifting towards a balanced market.  We are still safely in a seller's market. 

Why the gap exists

Start with the appreciation data. Federal Housing Finance Agency figures — measuring actual purchase transactions — show Cincinnati home prices climbed roughly 63% between early 2020 and early 2026. The national figure over the same stretch was about 59%. We didn't sit out the BOOM, we actually had one of the biggest increases. 

The difference between here and the markets that are struggling isn't how far prices went up. It's how those price increases happened. Austin home prices saw a similar percentage increase, in barely two years, peaked in spring 2022, and has been drifting down since. A spike and now a fall.  When a market climbs that fast, prices out pace local incomes and that gap eventually closes by home prices leveling back out.

Conversely, Cincinnati took six years to see a similar growth in home values, and our home prices are the highest they have ever been.  The speed of  home value increses as slowed but values haven't fallen here. The pace has stepped down gradually rather than sharply fallen off like in cities like Austin and Denver. 

Another factor that is helping our market, is the cost of homeownership here compared to the national average. Our $350,000 median home price sits about $84,000 below the national median of $434,100. On a 30-year loan at 6.67% with 20% down, that gap is roughly $433 a month — about $5,200 a year. Same rate, same terms, different starting price. When rates climbed, that difference kept buyers here in the game while buyers in pricier metros got squeezed out.  

 The long and short of it, slower growth and more afforablity means that our market hasn't seen the dip other parts of the county is seeing. 

Two numbers that look like they disagree

If you go poking at this data yourself, you'll hit something confusing, so let me get ahead of it.

Our local MLS numbers show the median sale price up 4.6% this year. The FHFA index for the same time period, shows Cincinnati home values up only about half a percent over the past year. They look contradictory. They aren't — they answer different questions.

The median home price is the middle number out of everything that sold. If pricier houses sell this year than last, the median climbs even if no individual house gained a dollar. Our inventory growth is concentrated at the higher end, which pulls that middle number up.  This actually is a national trend, and could be a whole blog post on it's own. 

The FHFA index follows the same houses across repeat sales — the same address that sold in 2021 and again in 2026 — so it isolates what one particular home is worth over time.

Both are real. Our market is busy, fast, and absorbing more inventory than a year ago; that's the median talking. But the value of the house you already own is growing slowly right now compared to 2021 through 2024; that's the FHFA index talking.

If you're a seller, the second number is the one I'd sit with. The froth is out of it. Your house is almost certainly worth more than you paid for it a few years — but likely not much more than last summer. Pricing as though it picked up another 5% since is what is getting many sellers in trouble. The sellers that are using that stat to price their house rather than looking at true comparable sales in the area are the ones that are sitting on the market for longer than the average 8 days, and ultimately have to do price drops. 

That's not a soft market. It's a market that stopped rewarding wishful pricing. 

It doesn't look the same everywhere

The metro-wide numbers smooth over real variation across the metro area. Clermont County had the biggest jump in sales, up nearly 20% over last July. Warren is still both our most expensive and our fastest at seven days — and its median still came in below last July, as did Butler's, largely because those two are absorbing the most new inventory at the higher end. Hamilton landed closest to the metro average across the board. None of that means one county is winning and another is losing. It means a countywide median is a zoomed out view, and your neighborhood, your street is its own market. I broke down the markets in each county in the July market update if you want to see where yours landed.   Also, I can set up a custom market update specifially for your neighborhood,  just email me! 

What this means for you

If you're selling: you still hold the advantage, and that isn't true in most of the country. But this seller's market is not the name-your-price zoo we saw in covid times. . Eight days is the median, which means half of all homes took longer — and the ones that took longer were almost always priced above of what the comps supported. The buyers are buying but they are being choosey. 

If you're buying: 6.67% makes the monthly cost of homeownership harder and I won't pretend otherwise. But you're shopping 2,595 available homes, more than last year, with new listings weekly. What you don't have is a leisurely week to think it over, if you are interested in the well priced, well staged, well updated ones. At eight days, the buyers who win are the ones who did their financing homework before they fell in love with something so they an act quickly.  

If you've been waiting for national headlines trends to hit our market here: Stop waiting. Nothing in the July data points t and the story you're reading was written about markets that look nothing like this one.

 

Sources: Greater Cincinnati MLS data via Domus Analytics (July 2026), the National Association of Realtors' July 2026 Existing-Home Sales report, Realtor.com's July 2026 Monthly Housing Trends report, the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, the FHFA Purchase-Only House Price Index, and Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey.

Curious what these numbers look like on your specific street rather than across a whole county? That's a conversation I'm always happy to have.

Betsy Repaske

Real of Ohio

(970) 279-1719 · hello@ownyoursummit.com

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