2026 Mid-Year Market Check-In: What the First Half of the Year Tells Us About Your Next Move For the past two years, a lot of people have been waiting on the housing market to do one specific thing: drop rates dramatically and "unfreeze." That was the plan for buyers and sellers alike. I'll move when rates come down. That big drop never fully arrived. And the market changed anyway. It didn't unfreeze. It thawed. Slowly. Halfway through 2026, buyers in many markets have more homes to choose from, more time to decide, and more room to negotiate than they've had in years. Sellers are adjusting to a slower, more selective market. It's not a perfectly balanced market everywhere. But compared to the pandemic-era bidding wars, and the frozen, locked-up market that followed them, it looks a lot more balanced. Nobody rings a bell when a market becomes more negotiable. Booms and crashes make headlines; a market quietly returning to normal doesn't. So conside...