Top 10 Cities Where Home Sellers Offer Concessions

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.

Agents 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:

1. Seattle: 71.3%
2. Portland, Oregon: 63.9%
3. Atlanta: 61.5%
4. San Diego: 60.7%
5. Denver: 59.2%
6. Los Angeles: 56.1%
7. Sacramento, California: 52.5%
8. Las Vegas: 51.9%
9. Phoenix: 51.2%
10. 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:

1. New York: 5.5%
2. San Francisco: 14.9%
3. San Jose, California: 16.7%
4. Boston: 18.7%
5. Chicago: 26.4%
6. Philadelphia: 27.6%
7. Miami: 33.8%
8. Tampa, Florida: 33.9%
9. Washington: 39.2%
10. Baltimore: 41.4%

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