You have probably repeated the national headline, that nearly half of sellers are handing buyers a concession, and it sounds like a fair thing to say in any listing presentation. It is close to useless: the gap between the highest metro and the lowest is more than seventy points, and one line further down the same report describes the outcome sellers refuse to believe can happen to them.
BAM is writing up Redfin's May 2026 numbers, and the national line is the one everybody quoted: 46.2% of home sales included a seller concession, up from 43.1% a year earlier and the highest May share Redfin has on record.
Then the report breaks it out by metro and the national figure falls apart. Nashville sellers gave a concession on 75.5% of sales, Charlotte 71.4%, Atlanta 68.7%, Phoenix 65.6%. At the other end, New York is 2.9%, San Jose 5.9%, San Francisco 14.9%, Boston 26.7%. Same month, same country, more than seventy points apart. Orlando moved the most in a year, up 20.3 percentage points, while Seattle went the other way and dropped 17.5 points to 48.8%.
The line most agents skip is the last one: "Nationally, 15.7% of May sales had both a price drop and a concession, up from 12.8% a year earlier and the highest May share on record." A cut in price and a check to the buyer, on the same deal. BAM's instruction is short. Your sellers are going to hear about concessions from buyers, so you are better off being the one who brings it up first, with the data behind you.
“Nationally, 15.7% of May sales had both a price drop and a concession, up from 12.8% a year earlier and the highest May share on record.”
Right now the national number is doing your listing presentation for you, and in most markets it is wrong in a direction that costs you. In Nashville, telling a seller that concessions are possible understates it so badly that a seller who has not planned for one gets blindsided in week six and blames you. In New York, budgeting for one is the opposite error, and it makes you sound like you do not know your own market.
What changes is that you look up your metro before the appointment and put that number in the presentation as a planned line item, next to the price and the commission. And you say the 15.7% out loud, because sellers believe a price cut buys them a clean deal. Increasingly it does not, and the seller who hears that from you experiences it as expertise instead of a surprise.