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Top 10 U.S. Cities Where Home Sellers Are Offering Perks to Sweeten the Deal
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
Seller concessions surge in key U.S. cities as high costs and buyer caution reshape the housing market.
Home sellers are increasingly offering concessions such as home repairs as the housing market becomes somewhat more buyer-friendly.
That’s especially true in the Pacific Northwest and the Western U.S. in general. The West region contains nine of the 10 large metro areas where more than half of home sellers are offering concessions, according to a new report from Redfin.
Overall, 44.4% of sellers gave concessions in the first quarter of the year. That’s just shy of the highest level since the data was first tracked in 2019 (45.1% in early 2023).
“More sellers are offering concessions as rising housing costs and economic uncertainty make buyers nervous, and housing supply hits a five-year high,” Redfin said in the report.
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View RatesAgents told Redfin that some types of sellers, including condo builders, often prefer to give concessions over cutting list prices. What exactly is a concession? In addition to home repairs, a seller concession could also mean covering the buyer’s closing costs, including rate buydowns (in which sellers pay an upfront fee to temporarily reduce buyers’ mortgage rates), or offering new washer-and-dryer units.
Seattle and Portland ranked highest for seller concessions out of the 24 metro areas in the analysis, with 71.3% and 63.9% of sellers offering them, respectively. According to Redfin, high mortgage rates, expensive home prices and uncertainty about the economy are suppressing homebuyer demand, prompting sellers to try to sweeten the deal. But concessions are more popular in some segments of the housing market than others.
“It’s super common to see seller concessions for condos and new-construction townhomes, but less so for single-family homes — unless the single-family home has been sitting on the market for a while,” Stephanie Kastner, an agent in Seattle, said in the report. “Condos have become a tougher sell because of skyrocketing HOA fees and insurance.”
10 cities with the most seller concessions
Here are the large cities that had the highest share of sellers agreeing to concessions in the first quarter of 2025:
- Seattle: 71.3%
- Portland, Oregon: 63.9%
- Atlanta: 61.5%
- San Diego: 60.7%
- Denver: 59.2%
- Los Angeles: 56.1%
- Sacramento, California: 52.5%
- Las Vegas: 51.9%
- Phoenix: 51.2%
- Riverside, California: 51.2%
10 cities with the fewest seller concessions
In other cities, including some of the largest business hubs, concessions are much less common. That could suggest lower housing inventory or higher demand from buyers, but it could also stem from more realistic initial list pricing by sellers and their agents.
These large metros had the lowest share of sales with seller concessions in the first quarter:
- New York: 5.5%
- San Francisco: 14.9%
- San Jose, California: 16.7%
- Boston: 18.7%
- Chicago: 26.4%
- Philadelphia: 27.6%
- Miami: 33.8%
- Tampa, Florida: 33.9%
- Washington: 39.2%
- Baltimore: 41.4%
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.