I swear, if I hear one more person say, “I need to sell my house first…”

I hear it every day. A buyer likes a house, wants to make a move, and then comes the qualifier: “But I need to sell my house first.”

Here’s the thing: there are a tremendous number of buyers in the real estate market right now. I know that runs contrary to the popular narrative that high interest rates killed the housing market. They didn’t. I talk to buyers every day, and people absolutely still want to move, even at high prices and high rates.

They want bigger houses, smaller houses, pools, RV garages, different neighborhoods, different cities, and different lifestyles. There is no shortage of people who want to buy.

The problem is that most of those buyers are sellers first.

A buyer wants a $700,000 house, but he needs to sell his $500,000 house first. The owner of the $700,000 house wants a $900,000 house, but she needs to sell first too. The owner of the $900,000 house wants to downsize, but he doesn’t want to buy until his house sells.

There are three buyers. There are three sellers. Just like a healthy digestive tract, everybody wants movement.

The housing market isn’t dead. It’s constipated. Nobody’s going.

The Numbers Don’t Look Like a Dead Market

September’s Washington County numbers make the point. There were 321 residential sales in September 2026, compared with 322 one year earlier. Year to date, sales are actually up 1.9%.

At the same time, there were 1,992 active listings, up 6.4% from last September, and 625 new listings hit the market during the month, an increase of 14.5%.

The median sale price was $499,000, essentially unchanged from $500,995 last September. Homes that sold averaged 75 cumulative days on market, down from 85 days a year ago.

Those numbers do not look like a market where buyers disappeared. People are listing homes. People are buying homes. In September, prices were remarkably stable.

The market is moving. It just isn’t moving freely.

The Real Problem Is Liquidity

A lot of buyers are ready to move, but their ability to do it depends on selling the house they already own. Their equity is there, but it is tied up in the property. Until that sale happens, the next purchase often cannot happen either.

That creates a chain reaction. One transaction depends on another, which depends on another, which depends on another.

That is why the market can feel slow even when there are plenty of people who want to buy and plenty of people who want to sell.

The demand is there. The liquidity isn’t. The market is, tactfully put, “backed up.”

How Do We Get the Market Moving?

We can’t wave a wand, lower inflation, and magically return mortgage rates to 3%.

What I can do, as a real estate broker with thousands of transactions of experience, is help engineer the transaction.

Sometimes that means structuring a home-sale contingency in a way that actually works. Sometimes it means a bridge loan, HELOC, leaseback, longer or coordinated closing, loan assumption, seller-paid rate buydown, seller financing, seller subordination, or even a reverse offer. Sometimes it simply means pricing the existing home aggressively enough to create the liquidity needed for the next purchase. It also means persistent follow-up and asking a lot of questions to help buyers and sellers decide what is most important.

In an easy market, transactions often solve themselves. In a market like this, they sometimes need to be engineered.

Every situation is different, and nobody should take unnecessary financial risk just to make a move. But if you want to buy and the only thing standing in your way is, “I need to sell my house first,” that does not necessarily mean you are stuck. It may just mean we need to figure out how to get you moving.

Want to buy? Need to sell your house first? Not familiar with these strategies? Call me.

There are buyers. There are sellers. There is equity. And there are a tremendous number of people who would move if they could figure out how to get from the house they own into the house they want.

The housing market isn’t dead. It’s constipated.

And eventually, something has to move.

Joe Allen
Broker/Owner, Realty Absolute
Southern Utah’s Home Adventure Guide