The Fresno Bee ran a story on August 18 with a headline built to scare people. “Fresno ranks among least favorable markets for homebuyers in 2026.” It says Fresno is the 9th worst market in America for buyers, that sellers hold “firm control,” and that buyers have “little room to negotiate.”
I have been selling real estate in this valley for years. I look at our MLS numbers every single week. So let me say this as plainly as I can. That ranking is wrong, and you don’t have to take my word for it. The study’s own numbers prove it.
Let’s walk through it in normal English.
First, understand who actually wrote this “study”
The Bee describes the source as “a recent study by Best Interest Financial,” a “financial website.” That sounds official. It sounds like an economist somewhere crunched numbers.
Here is what Best Interest Financial actually is, in its own words at the bottom of its own report:
Mortgages are complicated. Choosing a lender shouldn’t be. At Best Interest Financial, borrowers come first, with personalized guidance and tailored mortgage options… Now an affiliate of Clever Real Estate, a free agent-matching service.
It is a mortgage lender owned by a discount-brokerage lead generator. The report page ends with a button that says “Apply Now.” The person who wrote it is described on that same website as a “PR writer and strategist.” Not an economist. Not a researcher. A PR strategist.
And here’s my favorite detail. The featured image file on that study page is named ChatGPT-Image-Jul-1-2026. The artwork was generated by AI.
This is not research. This is a marketing asset built to get picked up by newspapers, generate backlinks, and drive mortgage and agent-referral leads. It worked. It got the Bee to write it up for free. That is the entire business model.
That doesn’t automatically make it wrong. But you should know that the “study” ranking your hometown was produced by a company that sells you a loan and an agent referral at the end of the page.
Second, the study only measured three things, and none of them measure a buyer’s actual situation
Here is the methodology, copied word for word from the report:
Best Interest Financial examined data from Redfin for the 50 largest U.S. metros. Metros were scored based on the average sale-to-list price ratio, percent of active listings with price drops, and the average size of the price drop as a percent of the original value.
That’s it. Three inputs. And all three of them measure the same thing, which is how sellers behave with their asking price.
Look at what is not in the score:
| What actually determines whether you can buy a home | Included in the score? |
|---|---|
| Whether you can afford the home at all | No |
| Local incomes versus local prices | No |
| How many homes are actually for sale (inventory) | No |
| Months of supply | Reported, but not scored |
| How long homes sit on the market | Reported, but not scored |
| Seller-paid closing costs and rate buydowns (concessions) | No |
| Repair credits after inspection | No |
| Whether prices are rising or falling | No |
| Mortgage rates and monthly payment | No |
So a ranking that claims to tell you where “homebuyers have the most power” never once looks at whether a homebuyer can afford the house, how many houses there are to choose from, or how much money the seller kicked in at closing.
Think about what that means in practice. Under this methodology, the “best” city for a buyer is simply the city where the most sellers overpriced their homes and then had to publicly slash the price. It rewards seller mistakes. It does not measure buyer opportunity.
That is a critical distinction. When one of our local listings prices right the first time and sells in three weeks at 2% under asking, that shows up in this study as bad for buyers, because there was no dramatic price cut. When a seller in Austin lists $80,000 over market, sits for 87 days, cuts twice, and still sells above true value, that shows up as great for buyers.
The study measures which sellers were the most wrong. It calls that buyer power. Those are not the same thing.
Third, and this is the big one, Fresno’s own numbers contradict the study’s own conclusion
This is where the whole thing falls apart. The report describes the shared profile of the ten “worst” markets for buyers. Here are their stated averages for that group, against what Fresno actually did.
Every figure in this table comes from the study itself, so there is no mixing of datasets:
| Measure (all figures from the study) | Their “worst for buyers” group average | Fresno’s actual number | National average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale-to-list price ratio | 101.2% (buyers pay OVER asking) | 98.86% (buyers pay UNDER asking) | 98.3% |
| Share of listings with a price cut | 14% | 16.79% | 20.2% |
| Median days on market | not published for the group | 54 days | 49 days |
Read that table again, because every line goes the wrong way for their argument.
They describe the worst buyer markets as places where buyers pay above asking, averaging 101.2% of list. In Fresno, the typical buyer paid below asking, at 98.86%. They describe those markets as places where “few active listings are discounted,” averaging 14%. In Fresno, 16.79% of listings were discounted, which is more than their bottom-10 average. And by the study’s own reporting, Fresno homes take 54 days to sell, which is five days longer than the national average of 49.
Here is how the study characterizes the ten markets it says are worst for buyers:
High demand and low inventory in these markets mean sellers are rarely willing to negotiate. Few active listings are discounted, and the asking price is often just the starting point for negotiations, with many buyers bidding up to secure a home.
That describes Hartford. It does not describe Fresno, where the median buyer negotiated the price down and where more listings were discounted than the group average. Their own narrative does not match their own data for our market.
Even the analyst they put forward admitted it, in the Bee article itself. Clever data analyst Clara Haverstic told the Bee that Fresno’s 98.86% ratio means “homes tended to sell slightly under listing price” and that “the fact that it is less than 100% indicates slight favorability for the buyer.”
So the study’s own analyst concedes Fresno favors buyers, in a story headlined that Fresno is one of the worst places in America to be a buyer.
Fresno is the only city on that “worst” list where buyers actually paid under asking
This is the detail that should have stopped the story from running.
Fresno is the only market on that list where the typical buyer paid less than the asking price. Every other city the study published a figure for is at 99.22% or higher. The two it did not publish separately, Chicago and Milwaukee, both appear on the study’s own list of metros “where homes continue to sell above the list price,” so both are above 100% as well.
And look at the San Francisco line. In San Francisco, the average buyer pays 108.87%, almost nine percent over list. On a Bay Area home listed at 1.2 million dollars, that is roughly 106,000 dollars above asking, in cash, on top of the list price. In Fresno, the average buyer pays 1.14% under list.
The study puts those two buyers in the same category and tells you they have equally little negotiating power. That is a ten-percentage-point spread being treated as the same outcome.
When your bucket contains both the most competitive market in the country and a market where buyers get discounts, your bucket is broken.
Then ask yourself what Hartford, San Francisco, Chicago, Milwaukee, Providence, Richmond, Virginia Beach, Boston, Washington D.C. and Fresno have in common as housing economies.
Hartford’s average home value is about $205,000. San Francisco’s is well over a million. Fresno’s is around $391,000. These markets have nothing to do with each other. A metric that lumps them together isn’t measuring buyer conditions. It’s sorting spreadsheet columns.
Fourth, Fresno has been loosening, not tightening
The article quotes low inventory and says buyers face more competition than a year ago. Redfin’s own mid-year data, which the Bee published two weeks before this story ran, points the other way.
| Measure | Fresno, mid-year 2026 | Change vs. last year | National | Change vs. last year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active listings | 2,553 | +15.9% | 1,482,500 | +2.6% |
| Median days on market | 50.1 days | +20.7 days | 49.5 days | +4.2 days |
| Median sale price | $425,143 | -0.3% | $391,879 | +1.5% |
| Months of supply | 3.5 | +0.3 | 3.9 | flat |
One honest note on this table, because I would rather flag it myself than have someone catch it. These Redfin figures cover the city of Fresno for January through June 2026, while the study looked at the Fresno metro area. They are not perfectly interchangeable. I am using them because they are the same underlying data provider the study used, and because the direction holds up in metro-level data too. Realtor.com’s July 2026 metro figures independently show Fresno homes taking 55 days to sell against 57 nationally, with 18.4% of listings carrying a price cut. Slower than average, with real discounting activity. Same story.
Now go line by line.
Inventory in the city of Fresno grew 15.9% year over year. Nationally it grew 2.6%. Our supply expanded roughly six times faster than the country’s. That is one of the most important numbers for a buyer, and the study didn’t score it at all.
Homes here take almost three weeks longer to sell than they did a year ago. That’s a 20.7-day increase, versus a 4.2-day increase nationally. Our market slowed about five times faster than the national market. Every extra week a home sits is leverage that transfers from the seller to the buyer. That is not a tightening market. That is a market handing buyers time.
And Fresno prices have gone flat while the country’s kept climbing. Redfin has the city of Fresno at -0.3% year over year against +1.5% nationally. Other measures put us barely positive: Zillow has Fresno home values up 0.4%, and Realtor.com has metro list prices up 0.9% at a time when national list prices fell 2.4%. Take the whole picture and Fresno is essentially flat. Flat is not what “firm control” looks like. Sellers with real leverage push prices up, and ours have not moved.
About half of Fresno’s inventory, 49.9%, has now sat unsold for more than 60 days. Nationally that figure is 53.1%, so we are close to the national norm rather than dramatically better or worse. But think about what that number means on the ground. Roughly one in two homes listed in this market has been sitting for two months or more. Walk into one of those and tell me the seller has no reason to negotiate.
What “98.86%” actually means at your kitchen table
Percentages are easy to wave away, so let’s use dollars.
The study says Fresno’s median list price is $434,926 and the median sale price is $428,678. That is a gap of $6,248, real money that the typical Fresno buyer negotiated off the asking price. That is a full year of property taxes on many homes here. That is a new HVAC system.
Now compare buyers across the bottom 10, scaled to a $434,926 home so the numbers are directly comparable:
| Market | Sale-to-list | What the typical buyer pays vs. asking |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 108.87% | about $38,600 over |
| Hartford | 104.34% | about $18,900 over |
| Boston | 100.29% | about $1,260 over |
| Fresno | 98.86% | about $6,250 under |
The Fresno buyer is the only one in that group who keeps money. And this is the market the headline calls one of the least favorable in America.
Here’s the other half of it that the study completely ignores. Fresno’s median sale price of about $429,000 sits far below the California median no matter which yardstick you use. The California Association of Realtors put the statewide median for existing single-family homes at $904,640 in June 2026, which makes Fresno less than half. Redfin’s California median across all home types was $777,566, which puts Fresno at about 55%. Either way, a buyer here is purchasing at roughly half of what the rest of the state is paying. That is the most important piece of buyer-friendly news in this entire conversation, and a three-metric ranking that only tracks price cuts is structurally incapable of seeing it.
The metric they built the ranking on is falling apart everywhere
One more thing worth pointing out, because it undermines the whole exercise. The study itself admits:
Over the past year, price drop activity has declined in more than half (31) the metros we studied.
The share of listings with a price cut fell 0.91 percentage points nationwide. So the very yardstick they used to rank buyer power is shrinking across the country. Not because buyers everywhere are losing power, but because sellers and their agents have adjusted to a slower market and are pricing more realistically out of the gate.
Fresno agents learned that lesson early. Our sellers price closer to reality, so fewer of them need a dramatic public price cut. This study penalizes our market for competence.
And notice their own top pick. Detroit is ranked the #1 best market in America for buyers, and by the study’s own FAQ, only 19.8% of Detroit listings are discounted, which is below the 20.2% national average. Their number-one buyer’s market has fewer price cuts than the country as a whole. When your best and your worst can’t be told apart by your own primary metric, the ranking is noise.
What is actually true about Fresno right now
I am not going to do the opposite of what this study did and tell you it’s a buyer’s free-for-all. It isn’t. Here is the honest picture, which is more useful than any top-50 list.
Fresno in August 2026 is the most balanced market we have seen in years. We’re sitting near 3.5 months of supply, which is textbook neutral territory. Homes take roughly 50 to 55 days to sell, meaning you have time to see a property twice, get an inspection, and think, instead of waiving everything to win a bidding war. Inventory is up double digits year over year, so there is real selection. Prices are flat, which means you are not buying into a spike. And about half of what’s listed has been sitting more than 60 days, which is exactly where the best negotiations happen.
Meanwhile, mortgage rates are hovering around 6.67% (Freddie Mac, August 13, 2026), down slightly from the week before.
Every one of those conditions favors a prepared buyer. Not a desperate one. A prepared one.
The catch, and this is what the study genuinely cannot capture, is that Fresno is not one market. It is dozens. Clovis Unified school boundaries behave differently than the Tower District. New construction in the north behaves differently than 1950s stock in the central corridor. A well-priced $350,000 starter home in a good school zone may still get multiple offers this week, while a $700,000 listing three miles away has been sitting since April and the seller will pay your closing costs to get it done. One metro-wide average from a mortgage lender’s marketing department cannot tell you which of those two houses you’re standing in.
What bothers me most
It isn’t that a lender’s PR department published a thin ranking. That happens every week. That’s the content-marketing business.
What bothers me is that our hometown paper printed it as news, under a scary headline, without ever asking the obvious question. How can Fresno be one of the worst markets in America for buyers when the study’s own data shows Fresno buyers paid below asking, discounted more listings than the rest of the bottom 10, took longer to sell than the national average, and bought at roughly half the California median price?
That question answers itself in about ten minutes with the study’s own numbers. Nobody asked it.
Headlines like this have real consequences. Right now there is a family in Fresno sitting on a pre-approval, reading that headline, and deciding to wait until it’s a better market for buyers.
They are going to wait through the most balanced conditions we’ve had in years, the exact window where they had time, choices, and leverage, because a mortgage lead-generation site needed a press release and a local paper needed a story.
If you want to know what your specific street, price point, and school zone are actually doing, ask somebody who pulls that data every week and will show you the sheet. Not a national ranking with three columns and an AI-generated header image.
That’s what we do at FresYes every week. Reach out and I’ll show you the numbers for your neighborhood, your price point, and your timeline.
I love where I live, and I also love what I do. I'm lucky to be able to work in a profession in which I get to build relationships; one that has me meeting new people each and every day and helping them to build new lives in my beloved city. I'm lucky enough to work in a profession in which I can marry cutting-edge technologies and marketing techniques to good, old-fashioned, nose-to-the-grindstone work. I am lucky enough to work in a profession that allows me to work as an advocate for my clients; to use every tool at my disposal to get a job done well for them, and with as little stress and expense as possible.
I love my city. I love my job. One inspires my excellence for the other.
Fresno? I say FresYES
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