What Actually Defines a Buyer’s Market vs a Seller’s Market

The labels are shorthand for the balance between how many homes are for sale and how quickly they sell. Three published measures carry almost all of the useful information.

• Months of supply. How long the current inventory would last at the current pace of sales. It is the cleanest single indicator, and it is published monthly by the Central Virginia Regional MLS for every city and county in the region.
• Days on market. How long homes take to go under contract. Falling days on market with steady inventory means demand is absorbing supply faster.
• Direction of travel. A market at 1.8 months and falling behaves differently from a market at 1.8 months and rising, even though the level is identical.

The conventional reading is that roughly four to six months of supply is a balanced market, below that favors sellers, and well above that favors buyers. That convention is an interpretation used across the industry rather than a measured threshold, and we label it as such every time we lean on it. There is no published, authoritative definition of where the line sits.

How Much Inventory the Richmond Area Actually Has

In July 2026 the Richmond metro carried 1.8 months of supply, down 5.3% from a year earlier, on 1,049 closed single-family sales. Every core locality was under three months. The tightest were the City of Richmond and Henrico County at 1.5 months each, and both had fallen sharply year over year, by 16.7% and 11.8% respectively. Hanover, Goochland and Powhatan all moved the other way, with supply slightly higher than a year ago.

The listing-side picture is published separately by Realtor.com and distributed through FRED. That series counts homes actively listed rather than homes sold, so it answers a different question: not how fast inventory is turning over, but how much of it is standing there right now. Across the Richmond metro it showed 3,081 active listings and a $449,950 median listing price in July 2026.

Months supply: Central Virginia Regional MLS, closed single-family sales, July 2026, current as of August 10, 2026. Active listings and median listing price: Realtor.com data via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), July 2026 observation, listing side. Goochland and Powhatan counties have no FRED series.

How Fast Homes Are Selling, and Why Two Sources Disagree

Metro-wide, single-family homes that closed in July 2026 had been on the market a median of 19 days, down 13.6% year over year. Henrico was fastest of the core localities at 16 days, the City of Richmond next at 17, and Goochland slowest at 30.

Here is the part most articles hide. The Realtor.com listing-side series for the same metro and the same month reported a median of 40 days on market – more than twice the MLS figure. Both numbers are correct, because they measure different populations. The MLS number is calculated on homes that actually went under contract and closed, so it only ever contains homes that sold. The listing-side number describes the inventory sitting on the market at the point of measurement, which includes homes that have been listed for months and may not sell at all. Slow inventory inflates the second figure and never appears in the first.

The practical consequence: if you are a seller pricing correctly and presenting well, the sold-side figure is closer to your realistic expectation. If you are a buyer scrolling listings, the listing-side figure is closer to what you will see, because a lot of what is still available is what has not sold.

Three different sources, three different definitions and periods. CVR MLS: single-family closed sales, July 2026. Redfin: all property types, over the three months ending June 2026, “based on Redfin calculations of home data from MLS and/or public records”. Realtor.com via FRED: active listings, July 2026. Read across a row for context, never to compute a difference.

Why We Will Not Tell You What Percent of Buyers Paid Over Asking

You will find articles quoting a Richmond list-to-sale ratio, a share of homes selling above asking, an average number of offers per listing, or an absorption rate. We are not going to, because none of those figures are published for this market at any local geography we can source and verify. Where we cannot source something, the honest move is to say so rather than to produce a plausible-looking number.

Specifically, the following are not available from any public source for Richmond-area localities, ZIPs or neighborhoods, so treat any article that states them with suspicion:

• List-to-sale price ratio, or percent of list price received.
• The share of homes selling at or above asking price.
• Average or median number of offers per listing, and multiple-offer rates.
• Absorption rates, as distinct from the months-supply figure the MLS does publish.
• Weekly market figures at any local geography. Nobody publishes them. The “weekly” numbers that circulate are rolling four-week averages, monthly refreshes relabeled, or national-only series.
• Behavioral claims of the form “X% of Richmond buyers do Y”.
• Any forecast of where prices, rates or inventory go next.

What can be said, and is worth more than an invented ratio, is that inventory was under three months across every core locality and that sold-side days on market fell year over year in six of the seven core localities in the July 2026 report. Those are the conditions in which competitive situations arise. How often they arise on a given street, at a given price, in a given month is something your agent can tell you from live MLS activity – and it is a specific answer rather than a regional statistic.

Where Buyers Have the Most Room and the Least

Regional averages flatten the thing buyers most need to see. The July 2026 MLS report covers the whole Central Virginia Regional MLS footprint, not just the core metro, and once you look outside the core the inventory picture changes considerably. Several outlying counties carried three to five months of supply in the same month that Henrico and the City of Richmond were at 1.5.

Central Virginia Regional MLS, closed single-family sales, July 2026, current as of August 10, 2026. Sale counts in the smaller counties are low – nine to fifty closed sales in the month – so read those rows as a rough picture of inventory depth rather than a precise price signal.

Read that table as a commuting-distance trade-off rather than a ranking. Caroline County’s 80-day median and Louisa’s five months of supply mean a buyer there has time to think, room to negotiate and less competition. They also mean a longer drive and a thinner pool of buyers when it is your turn to sell. Neither is better; they are different bargains.

We cannot break this down by price tier, because months supply is not published by price band for these localities. If you want to know whether a specific price range in a specific area is competitive, that has to come from live MLS activity for that range.

What Buyers and Sellers Should Actually Do

Conditions like these reward preparation more than timing, largely because nobody can tell you what the next few months hold and anyone who says otherwise is guessing.

If you are buying:

• Get fully underwritten before you tour, not just pre-qualified. In a market where the tightest localities are at 1.5 months of supply, the strength of your financing paperwork is one of the few variables entirely under your control.
• Decide in advance which terms you are willing to move on and which you are not. Inspection approach, closing date flexibility and settlement timing are all negotiating currency that does not cost you purchase price.
• Look seriously at homes with longer days on market. That is where the room is.
• Consider whether widening your geography changes your options. The difference between 1.5 months of supply and 3.1 is the difference between two very different shopping experiences.
• Ask your lender for current terms and payment figures. This page deliberately quotes no interest rate, because rates change constantly and a rate printed in an article is stale before you read it.

If you are selling:

• Price against genuinely comparable closed sales, not against the metro median and not against your neighbor’s asking price. A $460,000 metro median says nothing about your house.
• Understand which days-on-market figure applies to you. The 19-day metro median describes homes that sold. It is an achievable target for a well-prepared, correctly priced home, not a guarantee.
• Put the money into condition and presentation before you list rather than into price reductions afterwards.
• If you need to buy as well as sell, plan the sequencing early. Tight inventory makes the purchase side the harder half.