Why Home Sales Are Falling Through in 2026 | The 7 Warning Signs

14% of U.S. home-purchase agreements that went under contract in July 2026 collapsed before anyone reached a closing table, the highest seasonally adjusted cancellation rate in nearly three years, according to Redfin’s July 2026 contract cancellations report.

In Fort Worth the figure was 18.1%. In Dallas it was 16.3%. Both sit above the national average., and that is where most national news coverage of this data will stop.

It shouldn’t stop there, because the two halves of the metroplex are no longer moving together. Fort Worth’s seller surplus jumped from 67 percent to 85.7 percent in a single month, the third-largest increase in the United States. Dallas was one of only five buyer’s markets in the country where the surplus narrowed. Same metro area, same month, opposite directions.

That divergence is the most important thing happening in North Texas real estate right now, and it changes what a seller should actually do depending on which side of the metroplex they are standing on. Everyone else is about to publish “DFW is collapsing.” That headline is lazy and it will not only cost people money but potentially the house they could have afforded now that will certainly become unaffordable as home prices rise through the years.

So, here’s the split, what is driving it, and what it means for your listing.

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The DFW Split: Two Markets Wearing One Name

Fort Worth is deteriorating faster than almost anywhere in America

Fort Worth had 6,749 buyers against 12,535 sellers in July, an 85.7 percent seller surplus, per Redfin’s July 2026 buyers-versus-sellers analysis. That surplus stood at 67 percent in June. Only Miami and Seattle deteriorated faster last month.

Pair that with an 18.1% cancellation rate, sixth-highest among the 50 most populous metros, and the picture is unambiguous. Nearly one in five contracts written on the west side of this metroplex does not survive to funding, and the seller’s negotiating position got materially worse in the last thirty days.

North Texas Market Insider™ · July 2026

One Metroplex. Two Different Markets.

Everyone is about to publish “DFW is collapsing.” The data says something more specific and more useful: Fort Worth and Dallas moved in opposite directions last month.

Getting worse fastest

Fort Worth

Contract cancellation rate 18.1% 6th highest of the 50 largest metros. Nearly one in five deals fails.

Seller surplus 85.7% 12,535 sellers against 6,749 buyers.

Month-over-month change 67% → 85.7% Third-largest increase in the United States, behind only Miami and Seattle.

The ground is moving under a 60-day listing. Price ahead of the comps and adjust early.

Hard, but stabilizing

Dallas

Contract cancellation rate 16.3% Above the 14% national average, below the top ten.

Seller surplus 99% 30,604 sellers against 15,377 buyers. Two sellers per buyer.

Month-over-month change Surplus narrowed One of only five buyer’s markets nationally where the surplus fell.

A difficult market that stopped getting harder. Preparation buys you more here.

The Insider Read

Same metro area, same month, opposite directions. Which side of the metroplex you are standing on should change what you do next.

Sources: Redfin contract cancellations, July 2026; Redfin buyers versus sellers, July 2026. Analysis by Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team.

Dallas’s market is hard, but it stopped getting harder

Dallas had 15,377 buyers against 30,604 sellers, a 99 percent surplus. Two sellers for every buyer, which places Dallas among the ten strongest buyer’s markets among the 49 metros Redfin analyzed.

Here is the part nobody is going to tell you: Dallas was one of just five buyer’s markets nationally where the seller surplus fell from June to July. It is a difficult market. The deterioration paused. For a seller weighing September against January, that distinction is worth real money.

Combined, the two metros hold roughly 43,139 sellers against 22,126 buyers. The two-to-one framing holds across the metroplex. The idea that both sides are moving together does not.

Where national data stops being useful

Texas is a non-disclosure state. Sale prices are not public record, which means Zillow, the national aggregators, and every AI tool scraping them are working from estimates rather than closed figures. That gap is the reason an automated valuation on your Waxahachie house is just a guess wearing good branding.

I always pull the city and county level numbers directly from NTREIS.

Market Snapshot · Live NTREIS Data

The Four Numbers That Decide Whether Your Contract Survives

Everything above this point is national data, and national data stops being useful at the county line. In most states what a home sold for is public record. In Texas it is not. Sales price information provided to appraisal districts is confidential under Tax Code 22.27, which means every national site and every AI tool scraping them is estimating closed prices here rather than reporting them. These four charts come from NTREIS, the MLS, where the confirmed numbers actually live. Read them in order. Together they tell you whether you are pricing into a market that will hold your contract or one that will break it.

Median Sales Price

What Buyers Are Actually Paying

The middle point of all closed sales, so one luxury outlier cannot skew it. This is the number an appraiser works from and the number a Zestimate is guessing at. If your list price is built on a neighbor’s best comp rather than the median, you are pricing into an appraisal gap before you ever accept an offer. That gap is one of the most common reasons a contract dies in week four.

Closed Sales

How Much Is Actually Trading

Completed transactions where financing cleared and the home changed hands. Pending sales can collapse. These cannot. Read it against price, never alone. Rising prices with rising volume is genuine demand. Rising prices with falling volume means sellers are holding a number that fewer buyers will accept, and that is exactly the condition that produces walked contracts rather than closed ones.

Percent Of Original List Price

What Overpricing Actually Costs

What homes closed for measured against their original ask, before any reductions. Near 100 percent means sellers are getting their number. Below it, that gap is what the market took back from everyone who priced ahead of it. This is the honest scoreboard on day-one pricing, and it is the number that tells you whether a price cut is coming for you too.

Showings To Pending

Where Buyer Leverage Shows Up First

How many showings it takes to produce one home going under contract. This is the earliest honest signal on the page. A low number means homes are selling on the first weekend. A climbing number means sellers are opening the door again and again before anyone writes, and that is buyer leverage arriving weeks before it reaches an asking price or a cancellation statistic. When this line rises, the buyer who does eventually write knows they had options, and buyers who know they had options walk.

All four charts update automatically from NTREIS as new sales close. Want these filtered to Ellis County, or to your specific submarket, with your own home run against them before you set a list price? Call 214-228-0003.

Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team · northtexasmarketinsider.com

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The National Picture, and the Part Everybody Misreads

Roughly 14% of home-purchase agreements nationwide fell out of contract in July, up from 13.7% in June and the highest share since November 2023 on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Redfin’s own analysis notes the share has moved in small swings, roughly 13-14%, for the last four years. The rate did not explode, but the context underneath it did.

In 2021 and 2022, buyers waived inspections, waived appraisals, and wrote love letters to win the right to overpay. A cracked slab was just a rounding error. Today’s buyers have 11 other houses to look at and no reason to fight for yours. The exit ramp that did not exist 3 years ago is now paved, lit, and clearly marked.

The geography confirms it. The highest cancellation rates in the country cluster almost entirely in Sun Belt and Southern metros, the same markets that built aggressively through the pandemic boom.

Contract Cancellations · July 2026

Where Deals Are Dying Fastest

Share of home-purchase agreements that fell out of contract before closing, among the 50 most populous U.S. metros. Three Texas metros sit in the top six. Both halves of Dallas-Fort Worth sit above the national average.

July 2026 contract cancellation rate by metro

Metro	Cancellation Rate
Atlanta, GA	19.8%
Houston, TX	19.6%
San Antonio, TX	18.7%
Las Vegas, NV	18.6%
Orlando, FL	18.2%
Fort Worth, TX	18.1%
Tampa, FL	18.0%
Detroit, MI	17.3%
Jacksonville, FL	17.3%
Denver, CO	17.2%
Dallas, TX	16.3%
National average	14.0%

For contrast, the lowest cancellation rates in the country were Nassau County, New York at 3.5 percent, San Francisco at 4.1 percent, and San Jose at 6.5 percent. Where buyers have options, buyers walk.

Source: Redfin, July 2026 contract cancellations report. Analysis by Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · North Texas Market Insider™

Contrast that with Nassau County, New York at 3.5 percent, San Francisco at 4.1 percent, and San Jose at 6.5 percent. Where buyers have options, buyers walk. Where they do not, they close. North Texas gave buyers options.

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What Is Actually Driving the Collapse

Rates jumped, and they jumped in the exact month deals started dying

This is the driver most coverage buried, and it explains the timing.

The 30-year fixed averaged 6.67% as of August 27, 2026, up from 6.65% the prior week and 6.56% a year earlier, per Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That number in isolation almost looks like nothing, but the trend behind it is the story.

Rates moved sharply higher starting in early July, off a plateau established in late May, and the 30-year now sits near a 12-month high after briefly dipping below 6 percent in February. Redfin ties July’s demand collapse directly to rates hitting their highest level in a year.

Do the math on what that does to a buyer already under contract. A 65-basis-point move on a $400,000 loan is roughly $175 a month. A buyer who set their budget in May and watched their rate move in July is not reading an inspection report as a repair list. They are reading it as an exit.

This is also the year that broke the forecasts. I laid out the consensus in The Complete 2026 North Texas Real Estate Intelligence Report, where economists at NAR, Realtor.com, Zillow, and Redfin were describing a reset and a normalization. The pricing rebalancing arrived in full force and the rate relief that was supposed to come with it did not.

30-Year Fixed · 2026

The Spike Nobody Priced In

Deals started dying in July. Rates started climbing in early July. That is not a coincidence, and it is the part most coverage of the cancellation data left out.

1. February 2026 Below 6.00% Rates briefly dip under six percent as the job market weakens and rate cuts look likely. Buyers set budgets here.
2. Late May 2026 Plateau Rates settle into a holding pattern. Spring contracts are written against this assumption.
3. Early July 2026 Sharp move higher Rates break out of the plateau and climb. Buyers already under contract watch their payment change underneath them.
4. August 27, 2026 6.66% Near a twelve-month high, up from 6.65% the prior week and 6.56% a year earlier. No meaningful break below six percent is forecast.

What that does to a buyer under contract

A 65-basis-point move on a $400,000 loan is roughly $175 a month. A buyer who set their budget in May and watched their rate move in July is not reading the inspection report as a repair list. They are reading it as an exit.

Source: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. Payment figure is an illustrative estimate on a 30-year fixed loan, principal and interest only. Analysis by Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · North Texas Market Insider™

Buyers hold leverage they have not had since 2019

The number of homebuyers nationally fell to an estimated 966,752 in July, the lowest on record, against an estimated 1,462,921 sellers. That is 51.3 percent more sellers than buyers, just short of December’s record.

A squeaky floor used to be a negotiating item. Now it is a reason to go look at house number 15. Redfin Premier agent Juan Castro described buyers who “get cold feet before the inspection”, revisit the numbers with their lender, and sometimes never send the earnest money deposit at all.

The inspection report is now ammunition

In a seller’s market, an inspection gave information. In our current market, it is a loaded negotiating instrument. Buyers are using inspection findings and soft appraisals to reprice the deal or exit inside the option period. High prices plus a rate spike have left buyers with no cushion, so a surprise repair estimate is now enough to end a transaction that would have closed without a phone call in 2021.

The lock-in is unwinding, and that is where your competition came from

Everyone knows homeowners with 3% notes do not want to trade them for 6.67%. Almost nobody has put a number on how compelling that reasoning really is.

Thankfully the Federal Housing Finance Agency did. For every percentage point market rates exceed a homeowner’s origination rate, the probability of that home selling drops 18.1%, a friction that prevented an estimated 1.33 million home sales. A homeowner with a current rate at 3% facing selling and moving to a 6.67% market rate is roughly half as likely to move.

Now here’s the part that runs opposite to how most agents frame it. That lock is slowly coming undone. FHFA National Mortgage Database figures show mortgages under 4% fell to 49.9% of outstanding loans in the first quarter of 2026, marking the first time under half since the third quarter of 2020. The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M found the same thing from the Texas side: record seller activity in 2024 and 2025 came largely from existing homeowners being driven by life events rather than by rates improving.

I called this shift in March in The Mortgage Lock-In Era Is Ending And North Texas Is Where You’ll Feel It First. What has happened since is that the unwinding continued while rates unfortunately went the wrong direction. That is the combination sellers are living inside and struggling against right now.

Every quarter that lock-in effect unwinds a little more and more owners stop feeling trapped and start listing. It’s important to note, that is not a recovery signal. That’s your competition arriving. The seller surplus in Dallas and Fort Worth is not an accident of this summer. It is a four-year logjam draining into a market where buyer demand hit a record low. Sellers who read “the lock-in effect is easing” as good news have it exactly backwards.

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If You Are Selling in Fort Worth

Everything above applies to you harder, and the standard advice is not sufficient. A market that moved from a 67% to an 85.7% seller surplus in thirty days is a market where the ground shifts underneath a 60-day listing. Four adjustments.

Fort Worth · Seller Action Plan

Four Moves for the Fastest-Deteriorating Seller Position in Texas

An 18.1 percent cancellation rate and a seller surplus that jumped from 67 to 85.7 percent in thirty days. Standard advice is not sufficient here. These four adjustments are.

1. Price to October, not to June

   In a market moving this fast, current comps are a lagging indicator. June closings reflect contracts written in April, before the rate spike and before the surplus jumped eighteen points. Pricing to those comps means pricing to a market that no longer exists.

2. Adjust at day fourteen, not day forty-five

   Every additional week on market is a week your competition grows. The seller who cuts early cuts once. The seller who chases the market down cuts three times and lands below where the first cut would have put them.

3. Treat the option period as the real close

   With nearly one in five contracts failing, going under contract is not the finish line. It is the start of the risk window. Pre-listing inspection, repairs completed or credited before you accept, disclosure delivered early. Remove every reason a nervous buyer can reach for.

4. Weigh buyer strength over price, harder than Dallas would

   When almost one in five deals dies, a strong offer at a slightly lower number beats a fragile offer at the top. A contingent-sale buyer in Fort Worth right now is a coin flip that costs you six weeks when it fails.

Selling in Dallas or Ellis County instead? The urgency is real but the ground is steadier, and the answer changes. Call 214-228-0003 and I will run your submarket before you set a price.

Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team · northtexasmarketinsider.com

If you are selling in Dallas, or in Ellis County where the dynamics run on their own supply timeline, the urgency is real but the ground is steadier. Ellis County carries pressure that is still arriving rather than already here, driven by the 13,000-home Westlake development coming to Waxahachie and the 75-acre Palmetto Road development. Resale sellers here are competing against builder incentives that reset monthly, which is a different problem than a collapsing buyer pool and calls for a different answer.

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The Settlement Friction Nobody Is Pricing In

On August 19, 2026, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the Sitzer/Burnett settlements, rejecting seven separate groups of objectors and intervenors, as reported by Inman. NAR’s portion was $418 million, with combined settlements exceeding $1 billion. Counsel for some objectors has signaled a possible petition to the Supreme Court, so the file is affirmed rather than fully closed.

The practical answer for sellers is short. The MetroTex Association of REALTORS® confirmed no new practice change results from the ruling. What changed already changed in August 2024: buyer-agent compensation came off the MLS, and it is now negotiated in a conversation instead of populated in a field. More moving parts early in a deal means more places for a deal to stall before it builds momentum.

Texas layered its own change on top. Senate Bill 1968, effective January 1, 2026, repealed subagency from the Texas Real Estate License Act and requires a license holder to enter a written agreement with a prospective buyer before showing residential property, or before making an offer if no property will be shown.

One clarification most agents are getting wrong: the required agreement is not automatically a buyer representation agreement, and the statute preserves a narrow path for showing property without representing the buyer. It imposes no direct obligation on sellers and does not apply to commercial or raw land. What it does mean is that the buyer walking through your living room has more likely had a real conversation about representation and cost before they arrived.

The 7 Warning Signs Your Deal Is About to Fall Apart

Almost nothing about a collapsed contract is sudden. That is the part sellers get wrong. The deal that dies on day nineteen was showing symptoms on day six, and the seller who lost it was usually not blindsided. They noticed something and decided to wait and see whether it would resolve on its own.

In a market where the buyer has eleven other houses and no reason to fight for yours, waiting is the decision that costs you the contract. So before the playbook, here is the diagnostic. Three of these appear before you ever accept an offer, which means they are still pricing and screening decisions. Four appear while you are under contract, which means they are response-time decisions. Six of the seven are visible before the deal actually breaks.

North Texas Market Insider™ · Seller Diagnostic

The 7 Warning Signs Your Deal Is About to Fall Apart

Cancellations almost never come out of nowhere. They telegraph. Three of these show up before you ever accept an offer. Four show up while you are under contract, and every one of them is still fixable at the moment you spot it.

Before you accept an offer

1. Showings-to-pending is climbing in your submarket

   Sellers around you are opening the door again and again before anyone writes. This is the earliest signal that exists, and it arrives weeks before it shows up in an asking price or a cancellation statistic.

   The move: Price to the trend, not to the last closed comp.

2. You needed a price cut inside the first 30 days

   The cut costs you dollars. The story costs you more. Every buyer touring after that reduction now knows something about your motivation, and motivated sellers get offers written to be renegotiated later.

   The move: Cut once, cut decisively, and cut early rather than chasing.

3. The offer depends on selling their house first

   A home sale contingency runs 30 to 60 days. The national median time to sell was about 53 days in June 2026, which means that window is now the entire clock instead of a cushion. Your deal is two transactions, and the one you do not control is running on the same failure odds as the one you do.

   The move: Ask one question. Is their home under contract, or only listed?

Once you are under contract

4. The buyer goes quiet for more than 48 hours

   Silence in a transaction is almost never neutral. A buyer who has stopped responding is usually a buyer who has started reconsidering, or a buyer whose agent is already opening other doors for them.

   The move: Your agent calls theirs the same day. Not an email. A call.

5. The inspection comes back as a demand, not a list

   There is a real difference between a buyer who wants the water heater addressed and a buyer who has assembled a document. The second one is building a case for either a discount or an exit, and the option period gives them both.

   The move: Respond fast and specifically. Delay reads as resistance.

6. Their financing or lender changes mid-contract

   A buyer switching lenders or loan products three weeks in is a buyer whose numbers stopped working. With rates near a twelve-month high, that payment recalculation is happening in real time on deals written this spring.

   The move: Get a fresh written approval, not a verbal reassurance.

7. Their rate lock expires before your closing date

   This is the one almost nobody checks, and it is the quietest deal-killer on the list. An expired lock in a rising-rate month means the buyer requalifies at a worse payment, and some of them will not clear it.

   The move: Confirm the lock expiration date the week you go under contract.

The Insider Read

Six of these seven are visible before the deal breaks. The sellers losing contracts right now are not unlucky. They are the ones who saw a sign and waited to see if it would resolve on its own.

Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® · Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team · 214-228-0003 · northtexasmarketinsider.com

Read that list as a checklist rather than a worry. Every one of those signs has a move attached, and the move is almost always faster communication or an earlier decision than instinct wants. The playbook below is what you do about them.

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The Seller’s Playbook

Seven moves, in the order they matter.

Order the inspection before the buyer does. This is not just my position. Redfin’s own guidance to sellers in the cancellation report leads with completing an inspection before listing, so problems surface on your timeline instead of ambushing you on day twelve. You then repair, or you price the credit in knowingly, instead of negotiating from surprise. In North Texas this is not optional: clay soil moves, foundations move with it, and a pre-listing foundation inspection in Ellis County is the cheapest insurance available against a contract collapsing in week two.

Price it right on day one, because you only get one day one. An aggressive list price is not a negotiating strategy inside an 85-to-99% seller surplus. It is an invitation for buyer skepticism that resurfaces at the inspection table. Worse, a cut inside thirty days tells every buyer touring your home a story about your motivation, and motivated sellers get contracts that renegotiate. A defensible price built on MLS-verified closed comparables attracts serious buyers immediately, and an automated estimate cannot do that job in a non-disclosure state where the algorithm never sees the closed number. I break down how a proper CMA closes that gap on my Selling Your Home in North Texas page.

Read the whole offer, not the top line. Financing type, contingencies, timeline, and whether the purchase depends on selling another house first all matter more than the headline number. When 14 percent of contracts die nationally and 18.1 percent die in Fort Worth, the highest offer is frequently the riskiest one.

Contingent offers deserve a specific kind of scrutiny, and not for the reason most agents give. Nobody has actually measured whether contingent offers are more common than they were three years ago, so anyone telling you they have spiked is guessing. What changed is not how often they show up. It is what they cost you when they show up.

A home sale contingency typically runs 30 to 60 days. The national median time to sell was roughly 53 days in June 2026. In 2021 that window was a formality, because the buyer’s house sold on the first weekend and the contingency cleared before your option period closed. Today the window is the entire clock, and your transaction has become two transactions running in sequence, only one of which you control. The one you do not control is subject to the same cancellation odds as the one you do.

That reframes the question. It is not whether you accept a contingent offer. It is whether their house is under contract or merely listed. A buyer whose home is already under contract has cleared the risk you actually care about. A buyer whose home is listed with showings is a maybe. A buyer whose home has not hit the market is asking you to hold your house off the market while they start a process that takes two months. There is also more of this than you might assume in the buyer pool: NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers put first-time buyers at a record-low 21 percent of the market, meaning 79 percent are repeat buyers, and 54 percent of those repeat buyers funded the purchase with proceeds from selling a previous home. Roughly four in ten buyers you meet are working from equity they have not liquidated yet.

Disclose everything, early, in writing. Texas Property Code §5.008 requires the Seller’s Disclosure Notice before the effective date of the contract. Deliver it late and the buyer gains a fresh right to terminate for 7 days from delivery, even if that lands 3 weeks in. That is an exit ramp you built yourself in a market that already hands buyers plenty. Concealing a known defect is worse than a fall-through risk: it opens exposure to statutory fraud claims and Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act liability that does not require proving intent. Full framework, including exemptions and the post-Harvey flood rules, is on my sellers resource page.

Answer everything within hours. Silence kills deals. Most fall-throughs telegraph themselves, and the best predictor of survival is communication velocity. Every hour of delay is time the buyer spends reconsidering a payment that got more expensive in July and is seemingly getting more expensive by the day.

Know your four moves on a low appraisal. Hold firm and ask the buyer to bring the cash difference, reduce to the appraised value, split the gap, or request a formal Reconsideration of Value. What you cannot do is contact the appraiser to apply pressure, which violates the Dodd-Frank Appraiser Independence Requirements. What you can do matters more anyway: your listing agent supplies additional MLS-verified comparable sales, which carries outsized weight in Texas precisely because non-disclosure means the appraiser may not see recent closings without them. This is the moment an agent with real MLS command earns the entire fee.

Pick the buyer who closes. Financing strength and timeline flexibility deserve as much weight as price. A cash buyer or a well-qualified conventional buyer with no contingent sale carries a fraction of the risk of a bigger number that depends on another transaction closing first.

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FAQ On The 2026 Housing Market

Why are so many home sales falling through in 2026?
About 14% of U.S. home-purchase agreements collapsed in July 2026, the highest in nearly three years. The drivers are a record-low buyer pool, a near-record seller surplus, and a mortgage rate spike that began in early July and left buyers with no financial cushion for an unexpected repair or a payment recalculation. Redfin, July 2026.

Is Dallas or Fort Worth the harder market to sell in right now?
Fort Worth, and it is not even close. Fort Worth ran an 18.1% cancellation rate against Dallas at 16.3%, and Fort Worth’s seller surplus jumped from 67-85.7% in one month while Dallas became one of only five buyer’s markets nationally where the surplus narrowed. Dallas is a harder market by absolute surplus at 99%. Fort Worth is the one getting worse fastest.

What are the most common reasons a buyer backs out?
Inspection findings used as leverage, a low appraisal creating a financing gap, a change in the buyer’s job or financing costs, and buyer’s remorse. All four are easier to act on when no competing buyer is waiting behind them.

Can a seller sue if a buyer terminates during the option period?
Generally no. The option period on the Texas TREC contract grants the buyer an unrestricted right to walk for any reason, in exchange for the option fee, which is typically forfeited to the seller.

What happens if the appraisal comes in below the offer price?
Four options: the buyer brings additional cash, the price is reduced to the appraised value, the parties split the difference, or the listing agent requests a formal Reconsideration of Value supported by additional comparable sales. Contacting the appraiser directly to apply pressure is prohibited under federal appraiser independence rules.

Should I wait for rates to drop before listing?
That bet has not paid out for four years, and waiting carries a cost most sellers do not price. Rates briefly dipped below 6 percent in February and are now back near a 12-month high. Meanwhile the lock-in effect is unwinding, which means every quarter you wait, more competing sellers enter the market. If rates fall, you get more buyers and more competition simultaneously. The timing question is less important than the preparation question.

Did the NAR settlement make it harder to sell a house?
Not directly, and the August 2026 appellate ruling changed nothing about day-to-day practice. What changed in August 2024 was that buyer-agent compensation moved off the MLS and into negotiation, adding process and paperwork to each transaction.

Does the new Texas buyer agreement law affect me as a seller?
Not directly. SB 1968 imposes obligations on license holders working with buyers, not on sellers, and does not cover commercial or raw land. The practical effect is that buyers touring your home have more likely had a documented conversation about representation and cost before walking in.

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The Bottom Line

Homes are closing every day in Waxahachie, Midlothian, Mansfield, Red Oak, and across the metroplex. The deals that die are not dying because of the market. They are dying because the seller prepared for a market that ended three years ago.

If you are in Fort Worth, the ground is moving under you and the answer is speed: price ahead of the comps, adjust early, and remove every reason a nervous buyer can reach for. If you are in Dallas or Ellis County, you have a difficult market that is not actively getting worse, which means preparation buys you more than it does in other parts of the metroplex.

Either way, the margin for error on pricing, disclosure, and negotiation has collapsed to nearly nothing. That is not a reason to wait. Waiting adds competing sellers to your street while the lock-in unwinds and does nothing for your position.

I track this data every month across Ellis, Dallas, Johnson, and Hill counties. If you want a real read on what your home does in this market, not a Zestimate guess, call me before you list.

Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | 16 Northgate Dr. Ste 100, Waxahachie, TX 75165 | northtexasmarketinsider.com | 214-228-0003

This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. All statistics are sourced and cited from Redfin, Freddie Mac, FHFA, TREC, and other named sources as of publication. This content is original and independently written for North Texas Market Insider and has not been published elsewhere.