UNITED STATES, Sept. 12 (DC Times Online) — Realtor.com’s August housing analysis found that median listing prices per square foot fell year over year in 36 of the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, extending a national decline that has lasted 10 consecutive months.
The national median listing price per square foot dropped 1.8% from August 2025 to August 2026, according to Realtor.com Research. The measure tracks asking prices, not the prices buyers ultimately paid in completed sales.
The results point to a broad shift in the housing market, but the size of the change varied sharply by region and metro area.
Which metros had the largest declines?
The Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, metro had the largest annual drop. Its median listing price per square foot fell 8.1% in August, according to Realtor.com.
The 10 largest declines were:
- Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas: down 8.1%
- Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida: down 5.6%
- Memphis, Tennessee-Mississippi-Arkansas: down 4.1%
- San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California: down 3.9%
- San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas: down 3.6%
- Denver-Aurora-Centennial, Colorado: down 3.4%
- Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Maryland: down 3.2%
- San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, California: down 2.7%
- Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, Florida: down 2.6%
- Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Oregon-Washington: down 2.4%
These figures refer to metropolitan areas, which can include multiple cities and counties. For example, the San Francisco ranking is for the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro, not San Francisco city alone.
The median listing prices in the 10 metros with the largest declines ranged from $299,995 in Memphis to $908,700 in the San Francisco metro, Realtor.com reported.
Were prices falling everywhere?
No. Realtor.com reported that median listing price per square foot increased in some major metros.
Providence, Rhode Island, recorded the largest gain at 9.3%, followed by Indianapolis at 4.4% and Chicago at 3.6%.
At the regional level, national median list prices fell 3.6% year over year in the Northeast, 2.6% in the South and 2.1% in the West. Prices were flat in the Midwest, according to Realtor.com.
What does “price per square foot” show?
A home’s price per square foot compares its asking price with its size. Looking at the figure can help compare listings of different sizes, although it does not capture every difference between homes, such as condition, location, lot size or features.
Because Realtor.com’s figures are based on listing prices, they show what sellers were asking rather than the final terms of a transaction. The data supplied by Realtor.com do not establish how the asking-price changes compare with closed-sale prices.
The August report also does not provide metro-by-metro figures for inventory, sales volume, days on market or the number of listings used in each calculation. As a result, the price-per-square-foot declines alone do not show how many homes sold or how quickly individual properties found buyers.
What may be driving the pattern?
Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel said many of the metros with the largest declines were fast-growing markets during the pandemic-era housing boom. He described the changes as those markets giving back some of their 2020-22 gains.
That explanation is a Realtor.com assessment. The supplied August results do not independently measure the effects of mortgage rates, inventory, sales volume or other market conditions on each metro.
For now, the clearest takeaway is that asking prices have softened across much of the country. But the national figure masks major differences: Austin and Tampa saw much larger declines than the national average, while Providence, Indianapolis and Chicago posted gains.
