Four in ten Sacramento listings took a price cut. What that means for yours

In September 2026, 2,164 listings in the Sacramento metro had their asking price reduced, out of 5,286 active listings. That works out to 40.9%. I got the percentage by dividing one FRED series by another, so the method deserves a paragraph before the charts.

Three counts and one division

All three series come from FRED's Housing Inventory Core Metrics release and cover the Sacramento metro, CBSA 40900. None is seasonally adjusted.

• The active listing count is single-family homes, condos and townhomes listed as active during the month. Pending listings are left out.
• The new listing count is listings added to the market during the month.
• The price reduced count is listings whose asking price was cut during the month.

The share is the price reduced count divided by the active count, times 100. The notes don't say whether both counts cover exactly the same set of listings. A house that took a cut and then went pending in the same month, for example, may not be counted the same way in both. So I read the share as an index: good for comparing one month with another, less good as a literal percentage. In traffic work we'd call it a ratio of two counts from different detectors. Useful, as long as you remember which detectors.

The share, month by month

Price cuts have a season, just like days on market. The share is lowest in winter, about 22% to 23% in December of both 2024 and 2025. It climbs through spring and peaks in summer: 44.9% in June 2024, 48.2% in June 2025.

2026 ran cooler for most of the year. May and June both came in at 39.8%, about five and eight points under the same months of 2025. July then jumped to 46.2%, the high so far this year. By September the three years had nearly converged: 40.2% in 2024, 41.7% in 2025, 40.9% in 2026.

My reading is that sellers this spring started closer to the market than they did in 2025, and the summer jump came when the market moved under them. Mortgage rates rose through the summer, which I cover on the rates page. That's a guess about motive, though. The data only shows the cuts.

The yearly view

Averaged over the first nine months, 2026 sits at 37.9%, two points under 2025 and close to 2024. The low years were 2020 and 2021, both under 31%, which were also the two years with the lowest mortgage rates in this data. The high years were 2022 at 47.5% and, to my surprise, 2019 at 44.4%. I remember 2019 as a normal year. For sellers it was a year of trimming asking prices, and 2026 is not quite back there yet.

Inventory: more houses, fewer contracts than 2019

Active listings bottomed at 1,476 in January 2022 and have mostly climbed since. September 2026, at 5,286, was the highest September count since 2019. It is still 7.1% under September 2019, so inventory is close to its old level but not past it.

New listings are a different matter. From January through September 2026, 22,926 new listings came on. That's 1.5% more than the same months of 2025 and 23.1% fewer than 2019. Fewer houses are coming on than in 2019, yet the pile of active listings is nearly as big. The difference is in how many leave. In September 2026 there were 2,190 pending listings, 40.9% fewer than in September 2019.

That gives you the ratio I watch most: about 2.4 active listings for every pending one in September 2026, against about 1.5 in September 2019. Put plainly, the typical house for sale has more competition per buyer than it did seven years ago.

The September table, year by year

2022 is the year to study. The 30-year rate's monthly average went from 3.45% in January 2022 to 6.11% that September, by my averaging of Freddie Mac's weekly numbers. In Sacramento the share of listings with a cut hit 68.2% in July 2022, the highest month from 2019 on. That is what a market looks like when the first asking price stops working for most sellers at once.

Since then the September share has stayed between 40% and 43% four years running. A price cut in Sacramento right now is ordinary. Buyers know it too.

What a rising share means for pricing a house you need to sell

When the share rises, more sellers are finding that their first price didn't hold. For someone with time, a cut is an annoyance. For someone on a deadline, each cut usually comes after a stretch of showings with no offer worth taking, and that stretch is the thing you can't afford.

So the better question is how to set a first price that holds. Here is what the data suggests:

• Price against the competition that exists today. With about 2.4 active listings per pending one, buyers can compare. Your price gets judged against the other similar houses they toured that weekend.
• Look at what went pending, not what's sitting. The active listings near you include the ones that are overpriced. The pending ones show what buyers agreed to.
• Don't anchor on the 2023 peak. The metro median list price was $679,322 in June 2023 and $599,950 in September 2026. A neighbor's 2023 number is a different market.
• Don't price off your tax bill either. Under Proposition 13 your assessed value starts from a base year value and can rise no more than 2% a year, so for a house owned a long time it can sit far below market. The state Board of Equalization explains the rules on its decline in value page.
• Decide your cut in advance. Write down the date and the amount before you list. A planned cut at three weeks costs less time than an argument at week eight.

If you can't afford a cut-and-wait cycle, it's worth reading up on how to price when you're short on time before you sign a listing agreement. Some houses also won't show well against 5,000 competitors: deferred repairs, tenants in place, a kitchen from 1978. Lorris Home Buyers in Sacramento posts a list of the houses a cash buyer will take as they are, which is a quick way to see if yours fits.

Before you set a list price

1. Get the active and pending listings within your size range and area from your agent.
2. Compute your own little ratio: actives divided by pendings. If it's well above 2.4, you are in a slower pocket than the metro.
3. Price to the pending homes, adjusted for condition.
4. Write down the cut you'll take and the date you'll take it.
5. Check the month on the calendar. The share runs highest in summer and lowest in December.

That's 2,164 sellers this September who picked a number and then came down from it. October's count posts on November 5. If the last two years are a guide, the share will slide toward the low 20s by December. I'll be watching whether it does that with mortgage rates above 7%.