Sep. 25—It’s been more than a year, and Terrie-Lea Blueitt is no closer to selling her home than she was last September.
She put her Accokeek property, two houses on a nearly 6-acre lot, on the market last year for just under $1 million. She thought it would be gone in a week, she said, but in one year, maybe 10 people have come to see it.
Shop Top Mortgage Rates
Powered by Money.com – Yahoo may earn commission from the links above.They lowered the price to $948,000. Then $895,000. Still, she said, there’ve been no takers.
Blueitt is one of many experiencing the cooling housing market across the nation. Data out of the Maryland Association of Realtors shows that the state’s housing market overall is slowing, as well, with densely populated areas such as Baltimore City, Montgomery, Howard and Prince George’s counties and others seeing significant decreases in homes sold this year, compared to last.
Prince George’s County, where Blueitt’s home lies, has seen a 22% decrease in home sales this year.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” she said.
Fewer homes for sale as buyers get shy
The big picture is complex.
Nationally, with job growth slowing and reluctant buyers, sellers are also pumping the brakes on listing their homes, according to Zillow research. The data shows homes are sitting on the market longer before finding a buyer, up to a median of 27 days, a full week longer than in 2024.
But while sellers in historically hot areas, such as parts of California and New England, can still typically name their price, much of the South, including Maryland, is becoming friendlier to buyers.
Here, in many cases, homes are selling for more, but higher-priced ones are often sitting on the market longer.
Maryland Association of Realtors 2025 President Cheryl Abrams Davis said several factors are behind this market: a lack of affordable housing, the low interest rates that homebuyers were afforded during the COVID pandemic, the state of homes on the market, and even the time of year.
“A lot of seniors are aging in place, and a lot of people still have a very good interest rate and have no incentive to move,” Davis said. “If there’s not enough new development being built, in addition to buyers believing interest rates are high, a storm brews.”
Davis called for Maryland state and local leaders to help developers cut through red tape in the permitting process in order to build more affordable housing and create more inventory.
“Housing is everything,” Davis said. “It moves the needle for the economy.”
Blueitt can certainly attest to that. A retired legal billing specialist, she’s looking to get a smaller home and travel, but without a buyer, she’s stuck, unable to turn the page to her next chapter.
“I thought I’d be a nut-job by now,” she said. “But I’ve decided to let it go. I’ve kind of given it up to the good Lord. He’s got it covered.”
A sign of a looming recession?
The current housing market seems to reflect a righting of the market rather than indicating a recession could be around the bend, said Christina DePasquale, a health and labor economist at Johns Hopkins University.
“While there’s an increase in supply, there’s not a glut of houses by any stretch,” DePasquale said. “Maryland has about two and a half months of supply of inventory of houses, which is well below what is referred to as a balanced market of six months of housing. That’s because the number of sales are decreasing.”
Like Davis, she noted that many people were unwilling to give up a 1- or 2% interest rate to move.
“That is keeping inventory quite low, significantly lower than historical averages and what we would truly call a buyer’s market,” DePasquale said.
However, composite scores from Zillow and Realtor.com that attempt to measure the balance of supply and demand in a real estate market each show the Baltimore area’s becoming better for buyers than before.
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson’s Zillow Market Heat Index of 61 out of 100 for August still indicates a sellers market, but is the lowest the area’s index has been since Dec. 2019. It’s six points away from what Zillow considers a neutral market, which Baltimore’s last was in November 2019.
Realtor.com‘s Hotness Index for Baltimore-Columbia-Towson last month was 52 out of 100, indicating a “warm” market slightly favoring buyers. It’s two points away from what Realtor.com considers a neutral market and the Baltimore area’s lowest score since July 2024.
——
——
But DePasquale said the market turn isn’t necessarily bad news when it comes to the economy — more of a righting of the market.
“Within the scope of Maryland, while sales are down, prices are still inching up,” DePasquale said.
DePasquale noted that, yes, foreclosures are up in Maryland along with credit card debt, with Lending Tree ranking the Free State as the second-most credit card debt-burdened in the nation. However, she added, data published last month by the Mortgage Bankers Association showed that mortgage delinquencies were slightly down in the second quarter of 2025, a good sign for the future stability of the economy.
“If we start to see larger rates of higher unemployment, much larger delinquencies, continued increase in credit card debt, that would indicate a recession is imminent. This, by itself, indicates a market correction.
“These housing prices have outpaced income increases,” she said. “That was not sustainable.”
Sellers, agents turn to unusual methods
Paul Bittner, a real estate agent in Howard, Carroll and Frederick counties, said he’s seen the market drop off significantly in Carroll.
In Frederick County, he said — an area that’s seen 17% fewer sales than last year, according to the Maryland Association of Realtors — a client turned a home he hoped to sell into a rental property when it couldn’t attract a buyer.
His client decided to rent the property out for a year and then put it back on the market next year, Bittner said.
Related Articles
— Average rate on a 30-year mortgage edges higher after declining four weeks in a row
— US home sales remained sluggish in August despite late-summer mortgage rate slide
— Baltimore home listing reportedly has jail used for Civil War spies — PHOTOS
— Could Columbia’s Gateway redevelopment be the county’s last hope at affordable housing?
— How to negotiate commissions with your real estate agent
“His mortgage is actually a little bit higher than the rent,” Bittner said. “He’s OK with maybe losing $100 or $200 a month instead of it just sitting and sitting and not selling. Because one month [without a tenant would cost him] $3,000.”
In Baltimore City, where the data shows home sales are down 12% from last year, Realtor Jessica Daily, who works with brokerage firm Compass, is having a strong year, she said.
“People are just buying houses,” she said. “I have people paying cash. I’ve had five groups of people move to Baltimore this year from other states, because Baltimore is one of the last of the affordable cities [on the East Coast]. People moving from Texas because they want to get out of Texas and away from its politics.”
But Daily said she is listing most of her properties as private exclusives, trying to sell them without ever putting them on the listing site Zillow, which costs the listing agent thousands of dollars a month.
“That has really drastically changed my business this year,” Daily said. “They’re really pushing us to do it.”
Over the summer, the brokerage Daily works with, Compass, sued Zillow over the real estate site’s new policy that it would no longer allow real estate professionals to list homes for sale on its site that had once been “pocket listings,” or private listings. Zillow published an article in March of this year based on data that found private listings disproportionately hurt sellers of color, costing them an average of $5,000.
Daily said in 2025, compared to 2024, her numbers were up 29% in the first quarter, 60% in the second quarter, and she anticipated an even higher return in the third quarter.
These private listings are a way to combat the cooling market, she said.
“There’s not a lot of inventory these days,” Daily said. “The reason we’re going that avenue is because we’re desperately looking for inventory to sell.”
Back in Accokeek, Blueitt isn’t sure what step she should take next. She’s switched Realtors, lowered the price and even taken it off the market for a few months to make some repairs. At this point, she said, she’s practicing patience.
“Honestly, once you kind of give it up, don’t try to control it and just let it be what it is, it’ll work itself out, one way or another,” she said. “I have faith.”
Steve Earley contributed to this article. Contact Kate Cimini at 443-842-2621 or kcimini@baltsun.com.
Originally Published:September 20, 2025 at 8:00 AM EDT
