Buyers Have the Leverage. Most of Them Don’t Know It.
I hear it every week: “We’re going to wait until the market cools off.” And every week I want to ask the same question back, cools off from what? Because if you’re a buyer in Central Oregon right now, you’re standing in the strongest negotiating position you’ve had in years. Most buyers just haven’t noticed.
Here’s what the numbers actually say. In July, nearly half of all closed sales in Bend, 48.9%, included a seller concession, and the median concession was almost $10,000. That’s real money toward your closing costs, your repairs, or buying down your interest rate, and it’s up more than 40% from a year ago. Roughly 60% of recent Bend closings finished under the asking price. And across Central Oregon, close to four in ten active listings have already cut their price at least once.
Read that again. The sellers are negotiating. The question is whether you’re at the table.
This isn’t just a Bend story either. Buyers now hold more leverage in 41 of the 50 largest markets in the country, and seller concessions nationally just hit a spring record, 46.2% of all sales. By one count, there are meaningfully more sellers than buyers in the market nationwide. When that’s the backdrop, the person with the pre-approval letter is the scarce resource. Sellers know it, lenders know it, and the sooner buyers realize it, the sooner they stop negotiating against themselves.
Around here, it gets even more interesting the further you drive. Bend still moves quick - I’ll get to that in a second. But head south to La Pine and you’ll find over 11 months of inventory sitting on the market. Terrebonne is carrying nearly two years’ worth. Powell Butte, over a year. For context, anything above six months is textbook buyer’s market territory. If you have any flexibility on location - if you can trade a fifteen-minute drive for real negotiating room, your dollar carries weight out there that it simply didn’t carry in 2021.
Now, I’ll be straight with you, because that’s the whole point of this blog. Leverage doesn’t mean you can lowball anything with a for-sale sign. The well-priced home in Bend - the one that’s clean, staged, and priced to the comps - still goes pending in two or three weeks, and about one in five homes still sells over asking. If you walk into that situation with a soft offer and a wish list, you’ll lose, and you’ll deserve to. Your leverage lives everywhere else: the house that’s been sitting 50 days, the one that’s already taken a price cut, the seller who listed at a 2022 fantasy number and is finally coming back to earth. That’s where deals get made.
So what does using this leverage actually look like? Three things. First, stop treating the asking price as the starting point and start treating the home’s days on market as the starting point, a house that’s sat for two months is a conversation, not a price tag. Second, think beyond price. A $10,000 concession toward a rate buydown can do more for your monthly payment than a $10,000 price reduction, and sellers are often more willing to give it because their headline number stays intact. Third, keep your contingencies. Inspections are back. Repair negotiations are back. The days of waiving everything just to be seen are over, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling urgency, not advice.
If you read my last market post, you know I don’t believe in waiting for rates to save you. This is the other half of that argument. You can’t control what the Fed does or where the ten-year Treasury lands. But you can absolutely control where you shop, what you offer, and what you ask for at the table - and right now, the negotiating power is sitting on the buyer’s side of that table, mostly unused.
Markets like this don’t announce themselves. There’s no headline that says “now is your window.” There’s just data, quietly piling up in the buyer’s favor, while everyone waits for permission that never comes.
The market isn’t going to send you an invitation. The leverage is already yours. Use it.
