By Joy Dumandan | Realtor.com
The winter blues are hitting the housing landscape and buyers are ghosting the market by snapping up a home from the wealth of active inventory, then backing out after it’s gone under contract.
And while the share of home sales falling out of contract this year looks much like last year, ending December at 7.1%, unchanged from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com® data scientist Sabrina Speianu, there are five markets that are being hit the hardest.
The largest percentage of buyers backing out of homes under contract are in Atlanta (10.3%), Las Vegas (10.1%), San Antonio, TX (9.6%), Riverside, CA(9.3%), and Phoenix (9.2%), according to Realtor.com data.
This comes as sales of existing homes nosedived 8.4% in January—the slowest sales pace in more than two years, even as mortgage rates touched a three-year low of 6.09%.
