10,418 Cut the Price. 34 Advertised a Rate Buydown.

There are 23,947 condominiums for sale in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County right now. More than ten thousand of them have already cut their price. Thirty-four are advertising a rate buydown.

Thirty-four. Out of twenty-four thousand.

This week Bill Mei and I went through what that gap actually costs a seller, and why almost nobody is making the other choice.

First, I got part of it wrong ten days ago

On the last episode I said the bond market believed the new Fed chair, and that his credibility would keep rates from getting worse. I wanted to say that out loud before anything else, because I was not going to pretend I did not say it.

Credibility keeping rates from getting worse is one thing. Making them better is another. Half of that held up. The other half did not.

When we recorded that one the ten-year Treasury was around 4.93. This morning it is about 5.21. Twenty-eight basis points in roughly seven business days, and it is the highest the ten-year has been since 2007. Not last year. 2007.

Freddie Mac’s survey crossed seven percent for the first time in twenty months, and that was the fifth week in a row rates went up. That survey runs about a week behind, though, so when Bill and I checked what was actually being quoted the morning we recorded, it was higher than that.

We said oil was driving the boat. The ship has hit the rocks.

If you want the full version of why a shipping lane and not a press conference is setting your rate, that is the episode from ten days ago. Nothing in it has stopped being true.

What a year of this did to buyers

Take a buyer looking at the same loan amount a year ago and today. The payment is a couple hundred dollars a month higher.

But it often does not show up as a payment. It shows up as buying power. That buyer was looking to borrow a certain amount last year, and today they are capped roughly thirty-two thousand dollars below it.

They waited, and they did not do anything wrong. They waited, and the market took thirty-two grand off what they can buy.

So that is the bad news. Now here is the thing sitting right there that almost nobody is using.

The tool, and why it is back

A temporary rate buydown. Every time rates go up, this is what lenders bring back out.

Bill walks through the mechanics on the episode, start to finish — how a 2-1 works, who pays for it, roughly what it costs as a share of the loan, and how a seller can put in a flat dollar amount instead of funding the whole thing.

It has been around as long as we have been slinging loans. It came to prominence in 2022 and 2023, then rates started sliding and we stopped talking about it as much. It has been a market for a while now where you can negotiate with sellers, and this is one of the ways to get a lot of bang for your buck.

We counted every listing in South Florida

Not a headline, not a survey. Every active residential listing in the three counties, pulled the morning we recorded — about 36,800 properties.

Almost one in two has cut. Fourteen hundredths of one percent are saying anything about the rate.

I went through it a few different times, because I thought the same thing you are thinking. I have also checked this historically on Zillow as a cheat, putting in the terms you would expect to see. It is always a minuscule number.

Builders figured this out. Individual sellers did not.

Look at what new construction does to move standing inventory. Concessions, and a lot of interest rate buydowns, to attract buyers and get them to close.

The adoption rate among average resale sellers — individual people using it to promote their listing and sell their property — is a lot lower.

One building’s worth of math

Aventura, 33180. Six hundred sixty-one condos for sale. Two hundred ninety have cut the price. The typical cut there is about 6.6 percent.

On a mid-market unit in that zip, 6.6 percent is about $31,350 off the price. That is real money.

Now the same seller. Instead of cutting the price, he puts roughly a quarter of that toward buying the rate down for the first two years.

A quarter of the money. About three times the monthly relief for the buyer. And the seller keeps more than twenty-two thousand dollars.

The worked dollars are in the episode, around the nine-minute mark. Bill asked me to say the last number again, because he did not think he had heard it right.

Why the gap is that big

Because of where the money lands.

A price cut gets spread across three hundred and sixty months. Most of what the seller gives up gets spread out over an enormous period of time for that buyer.

A temporary buydown puts every dollar of savings into the first twenty-four months, which is exactly when the buyer is most concerned, and when they have the most other things to spend money on. A lot of buyers are deciding right now whether they can do this at all.

So why is it thirty-four and not thirty-four hundred?

A couple of reasons, and one of them is probably ours.

The price cut is the reflex. It has been the reflex for forty years. House is not moving, drop the price. Nobody has to explain it to a seller.

Nobody told them. That one is on us, on lenders. Ten thousand four hundred sellers made the expensive choice, and I would bet most of them never had the other option put in front of them on one page. Bill’s point on the show was that we need to do a better job showing that this is a benefit to the buyer and a benefit to the seller both.

It is not free and it is not magic, either. There are limits on how much a seller is allowed to contribute and they change by loan program, so the number has to get checked against the actual loan before anybody promises anything.

The honest version

And there is a marketing side to it

If you are a seller and you advertise your property this way, it helps your listing stand out against everything else on the market. That is worth something on its own, separate from the math.

What I would do with this

Send it to us and we’ll run it

Listing agents: we have marketing materials to help you present this on a property where it makes sense. Buyers and buyer’s agents: send us a scenario and we will crunch the numbers and show you what the buydown actually does.

Either side of the transaction, it is worth understanding the options before you pick a path.

Capital Partners Mortgage Services, LLC · NMLS #2332376 · Craig Garcia, NMLS #653593 · 1515 N. University Dr., Suite D102, Coral Springs, FL 33071 · Equal Housing Opportunity · NMLS Consumer Access: www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org
Educational market commentary only. Not a commitment to lend or an offer of credit, and not investment, tax or legal advice. No specific rate, payment, down payment or loan term is offered or implied here; any figures discussed in the linked episode are illustrations for discussion only. A temporary buydown reduces the payment for a limited period; the note rate applies thereafter, and borrowers are qualified at the note rate. Seller and other interested-party contributions are subject to program limits that vary by loan program. Interest rate survey figures referenced are published by Freddie Mac and are national averages, not an offer of credit from CPMS. Listing counts reflect active residential listings in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County as of September 28, 2026, and measure what sellers advertised in MLS public remarks, not terms agreed at closing. Market conditions change daily. All loans are subject to credit, income, property, appraisal and program approval.