Good morning, NREB readers.

As always, we're here to keep real estate professionals informed while cutting out the fluff. Let's get right into it.

The national housing market slowed again in July.

Existing-home sales fell 1.7% from June, settling at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.06 million, according to the National Association of REALTORS®. Sales were still 0.7% higher than a year earlier, but the market remains stuck near historically subdued transaction levels.

That is the headline.

The more useful story is underneath it.

Sales at $250,000 and below are where much of the weakness is concentrated.

At $750,000 and above, sales are growing at double-digit rates from a year ago.

Same housing market.

Same mortgage-rate environment.

Very different buyers.

For agents, that split matters more than whether the national sales number was down 1.7%.

Start with the broad numbers.

Existing-home sales ran at an annualized 4.06 million-unit pace in July, down from June for the second consecutive month.

The median existing-home price was $434,100, 2% higher than a year earlier.

There were 1.54 million existing homes available for sale at the end of the month, down 1.9% from June and slightly below the level a year earlier.

That represented 4.6 months of supply, unchanged from both June and July 2025.

Homes spent a median 29 days on the market, just one day longer than in June.

Look only at those numbers and July appears fairly straightforward:

sales softened,

inventory slipped,

prices continued rising modestly,

and the market moved slowly.

But price bands tell a different story.

Homes priced $250,000 and below accounted for the weakness in sales, while homes priced from $750,000 upward posted double-digit annual growth.

That is not a small statistical footnote.

It tells us the housing slowdown is not being distributed evenly across purchasing power.

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Housing discussions often treat demand as one giant pool.

Mortgage rates rise, so "buyers" pull back.

Inventory increases, so "buyers" have more choices.

Prices fall, so "buyers" come back.

The problem is that a buyer shopping for a $225,000 home and a buyer shopping for an $850,000 home are responding to very different financial constraints.

At the lower end, relatively small changes in monthly cost can determine whether the transaction works at all.

A higher insurance quote matters more.

A property-tax increase matters more.

A mortgage-rate move matters more.

The amount needed for cash to close matters more.

And there is less room to simply move down another $100,000 in price when the buyer is already shopping near the bottom of the available market.

At the upper end, affordability still matters, but buyers are more likely to have larger incomes, existing home equity, investment assets, or enough cash to reduce their dependence on financing.

That does not make every high-end buyer immune to mortgage rates.

It means the same rate can create very different levels of pressure depending on who is borrowing and what they are buying.

July's sales data are showing us the result.

There is another reason lower-priced transactions can struggle even when demand exists:

there may simply not be enough suitable homes at those prices.

A weak sales count does not automatically mean nobody wants the product.

Sometimes it means there is not enough product to buy.

The national median existing-home price was still $434,100 in July.

Against that backdrop, a home priced below $250,000 is no longer simply an inexpensive option in many markets. It can be a scarce segment of inventory.

That creates a difficult combination for first-time and lower-budget buyers.

They are among the buyers most sensitive to financing costs, yet they may also be competing inside the part of the market with the least room to expand.

More expensive buyers can often change neighborhoods, property types, down-payment amounts, or financing structures while remaining active.

A household whose ceiling is $250,000 may not have another lower price band to retreat into.

The buyer mix reinforces the point.

First-time buyers represented 29% of July transactions, down sharply from 33% in June.

A year earlier, they represented 28%.

One month does not establish a long-term trend, but the drop is worth noticing alongside the weakness in lower-priced sales.

First-time buyers generally enter the market without the home equity an existing owner may bring into the next purchase.

That makes the entry point especially sensitive to the combination of:

home prices,

mortgage rates,

cash requirements,

property taxes,

insurance,

and available inventory.

A repeat buyer selling a home with substantial accumulated equity may be able to absorb a difficult financing environment differently.

A first-time buyer cannot bring equity from a house they never owned.

So when the market splits by price, it can also split by who has accumulated housing wealth already and who is trying to enter for the first time.

July's inventory number deserves some caution too.

Available existing-home inventory fell 1.9% from June to 1.54 million homes.

That may sound like the market suddenly tightened everywhere.

It didn't necessarily.

National inventory combines thousands of local markets and every price range into one figure.

An agent could be sitting in a ZIP code where listings under $400,000 remain scarce while homes above $700,000 are accumulating.

Another market could have plenty of condos but almost no detached starter homes.

Another could have rising supply overall because expensive listings are sitting longer.

This is why "inventory is up" or "inventory is down" has become increasingly incomplete information.

The useful question is:

Inventory of what?

A buyer does not shop the national inventory count.

They shop a price band, a property type, a geography, and a payment.

The same caution applies to the national median price.

July's median existing-home price rose 2% from a year earlier to $434,100.

That tells us the midpoint of the homes that sold.

It does not mean every home's value increased 2%.

And when transaction activity changes differently across price bands, the mix of homes actually closing can affect the national median.

Imagine two parts of a market:

lower-priced transactions slow sharply,

while upper-priced transactions continue growing.

Even without a dramatic change in the value of every individual property, the mix of what sells can shift upward.

That is one reason agents should be careful about translating a national median-price headline directly into:

Maybe they did.

But the national statistic cannot answer that for you.

Local comparable sales still can.

It would be easy to frame July only as another affordability story.

That misses half of it.

The fact that sales above $750,000 are posting double-digit annual growth means real transaction demand is still present.

It is simply concentrated differently.

That matters because a broadly collapsing housing market would look different.

You would expect weakness to spread much more evenly through price ranges.

Instead, the current market is showing a significant divide between households that can still execute a purchase and households for whom the numbers remain difficult.

That distinction helps explain why two agents in the same metro can describe completely different markets and both be telling the truth.

One may work primarily with entry-level buyers who are struggling to qualify, finding little usable inventory, and delaying purchases.

Another may work in a move-up or luxury segment where qualified buyers are still transacting and well-positioned sellers continue finding demand.

National housing statistics blend those experiences together.

Your business does not.

Price is the easiest way to see the divide, but the underlying issue is financial flexibility.

Consider what happens when conditions get harder.

A buyer with substantial cash can increase the down payment.

A homeowner with large equity can move that equity into the next property.

A high-income household may be able to tolerate a larger monthly payment.

A buyer with a broad price range can move down.

A buyer with flexible geography can widen the search.

Each option creates another way to stay in the market.

Now consider a household already at the limit of its monthly budget, with limited cash available and a narrow set of homes it can realistically purchase.

There are fewer levers left to pull.

That does not mean one buyer is more motivated than the other.

It means one has more ways to adapt.

The July price-band data are partly a picture of that flexibility.

A seller hearing that high-end sales are growing should not assume their $900,000 listing will automatically move.

And a seller under $250,000 should not assume that weakness in lower-priced sales means nobody wants an affordable home.

The reason behind the local sales pace still matters.

There is a big difference between:

not enough buyer demand

and

not enough financeable, desirable inventory at the price buyers can afford.

There is also a difference between a high-end market supported by strong demand and one where sales are up simply because the comparison period was unusually weak.

National data can tell you where to look.

Local listing and contract data tell you what is actually happening.

For agents working with sellers, the increasingly important question is not:

It is:

If July tells agents anything practical, it is that broad averages are becoming less useful.

Take your local inventory and divide it into meaningful price ranges.

Not necessarily the national $250,000 and $750,000 cutoffs. Those may make no sense in your market.

Use the bands your buyers and sellers actually live in.

Then look at each one separately:

How much active inventory is available?

How quickly are new listings going pending?

How many listings are reducing price?

How long are homes taking to sell?

How far apart are original list price and closed price?

How many competing listings does a seller actually face?

Is inventory growing because new sellers are arriving, or because old listings are failing to sell?

You may discover that what everyone casually calls "the market" is actually three or four different markets stacked on top of one another.

That is much more useful to a client than the national direction alone.

There is another reason to pay attention to this split now.

The National Association of REALTORS® is scheduled to release July Pending Home Sales on Tuesday morning.

Existing-home sales are backward-looking in one important sense: they count completed transactions, many of which went under contract weeks earlier.

Pending sales look at contract signings instead.

So tomorrow's report gives us a more forward-looking check on whether buyer activity improved, weakened, or simply continued moving sideways as summer progressed.

The number I would care about is not only whether national pendings rise or fall.

It is whether the broader evidence starts to suggest that activity is spreading beyond the buyers who have been able to tolerate today's affordability environment.

Because that is what a healthier recovery ultimately requires.

The housing market does not need only more transactions at the top.

It needs a functioning entry point too.

July existing-home sales fell 1.7%.

That is true.

But it is probably not the fact from this report that agents should remember.

The more revealing fact is this:

The lower end of the market is struggling while the upper end is still expanding.

That tells us something much more important than whether total sales moved a few percentage points in one month.

Purchasing power is determining who gets to participate.

Inventory is not equally useful at every price.

First-time buyers remain under pressure.

And national averages are becoming increasingly poor substitutes for understanding the part of the market where your clients actually transact.

So this week, don't just ask whether your local market is busy or slow.

Ask where it is busy.

That answer may look completely different depending on which side of the price line you're standing on.

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