MARKET · JULY 6, 2026

Monday Market Update: Luxury Sellers Sit Out the Summer

Inventory now sits below both last month and last year, with supply falling fastest at the high end as luxury sellers wait for late September. Stable, better than 2025, and quietly thinner at the top.

The Signal

Early July looks clearly better than early July 2025 on every headline measure, and more mixed against June, which is normal for this point in the summer. The percent of list price achieved ticked up to 97.3%, inventory and supply measures fell, and the annual sales rate continued its slow recovery, now 6.3% ahead of last year at 77,252. Pricing is slightly firmer measured by average price per square foot, up 3.2% year over year, while the median sales price has flatlined near $455,000. Supply keeps drifting lower: there are now fewer active listings than last month and fewer than this time last year, which means less competition for the sellers who remain.

The supply drop is not evenly distributed. It has been larger at higher price points, because many luxury sellers take their homes off the market during the hottest months and wait until late September to relist. Demand has eased since June, in line with the usual seasonal pattern, but it remains ahead of last year. June closings came in more than 9% above June 2025, though about five points of that gain comes from an extra working day on the calendar; the honest net is still solid. Overall this is a well-behaved, stable market, better than a year ago and admittedly unexciting. Nominal prices show no sign of significant decline, and with inflation running above 4%, homes have quietly become more affordable in real terms over the past several years.

The Numbers

Active listings excluding under-contract sit at 24,141, down 4.1% from a year ago and below last month as well. Under contract counts moved to 7,761, up 6.6% year over year. Pending listings hit 4,458, up 6.4%. The Cromford Market Index sat at 81.0, easing from 81.7 last month but up 12.3% from a year ago. Months of supply rose to 3.8 from 3.1 last month, still just below the 3.9 of a year ago. Listing success rate fell to 66.6% from 72.8% last month, the seasonal soft spot in an otherwise steady picture. Sale-to-list ratio firmed again to 97.28%, its second straight improvement. Average sale price held at $622,187, up 5.8% YoY, while the median eased to $450,000, up 1.1%. Monthly dollar volume reached $3.97B across the metro.

What This Means for the High End

The seasonal thinning at the top is the detail worth sitting with. When luxury sellers pull their homes for the summer, the owners who stay on the market face the lightest competition of the year, and the buyer side has not gone quiet: under contract counts are up 6.6% year over year and pending sales are up 6.4%. A well-presented home in the $850,000 to $2,500,000 range is competing against fewer alternatives right now than it will in October. Scarcity is doing part of the marketing.

The weekly city indices tell the same story from another angle. Fountain Hills rose 12%, Paradise Valley 10%, and Scottsdale 9% this week, with Scottsdale now within a point and a half of Chandler for the number two spot, while the rate-sensitive middle slipped: Gilbert fell 7%, Chandler 6%, and Tempe another 15%. The strength keeps clustering in the equity-driven, affluent submarkets, consistent with the price segmentation we have tracked all summer.

Two practical reads for a high-equity owner. First, if a fall sale is the plan, the late-September relist wave is coming; sellers who use the summer to complete inspection-grade repairs and targeted improvements will list ahead of that supply rather than into it. Second, the real-terms math deserves attention: when nominal prices hold flat while inflation runs above 4%, a home's purchasing-power value erodes at roughly that pace each year. Waiting for a visibly better number in a stable market carries a quiet cost. Neither point argues for rushing; both argue for positioning deliberately in your specific tier and timing window.

What to Watch

The June jobs report, released July 2, showed just 57,000 jobs added, roughly half of what forecasters expected, and April and May were revised down by a combined 74,000. That took the air out of summer rate-hike talk. Markets now put the odds of a hike at the Fed's late-July meeting around one in four, and the single hike still priced in has slid out to December. Chair Warsh kept the rhetoric hawkish, repeating that the Fed will not accept inflation settling above its 2% target.

Mortgage rates eased on the news. Freddie Mac's weekly 30-year average fell to 6.43%, daily quotes opened this week near 6.4%, and the 10-year Treasury sits around 4.47%. Oil has dropped to about $67, back near pre-war levels as the Iran conflict winds down, which should keep working on inflation from here. Softer jobs plus cheaper oil is the first genuinely rate-friendly combination in months. The next tests are the mid-July CPI reading and the Fed meeting at the end of the month; those will decide whether the relief sticks.