Redfin's July numbers landed today and they reframe where your marketing effort should go this month. Fourteen percent of homes that went under contract in July fell out of contract — the highest seasonally adjusted share since November 2023, up from 13.7% in June. The metro spread is where it gets actionable: Atlanta 19.8%, Houston 19.6%, San Antonio 18.7%, Las Vegas 18.6%, Orlando 18.2%. Redfin names two causes, and neither is rate. The first is leverage — with roughly 51% more sellers than buyers nationally, buyers are using inspection findings to ask for major concessions or simply walk. The second is payment anxiety, which is the polite phrase for a borrower who looked at the monthly number one more time and got cold feet. Read that as a marketing brief rather than a market report: the single highest-return outreach you can run right now is not lead generation, it is holding on to the deals already in your pipeline.
The rate backdrop is not the villain here, and saying so is part of the pitch. The 30-year is 6.72% today, essentially flat over the past week and up modestly from the low 6.6s a month ago, inside a 90-day range of 6.47% to 6.82% that has not broken in either direction for three weeks. On a $400K loan that is roughly $2,590 a month in principal and interest. A borrower who got pre-approved in June is not looking at a materially different payment today — but nobody has told them that, and the coverage they are reading is about a bond market at multi-decade highs and a national debt figure that crossed $40 trillion this week. The gap between what their file actually costs and what they think it costs is the thing that kills the deal, and it closes with one text message.
The tactical move is a scheduled touch you probably do not have yet: a payment confirmation that fires the day the inspection report is due, not the day before closing. That is the moment Redfin identifies as the walk-away trigger, and it is the moment your borrower is sitting at a kitchen table with an agent talking about repair costs. A one-line text with their actual payment on today's rate — theirs, not the market average — reframes the conversation from "can we still afford this" to "what are we asking the seller to fix." Pair it with an agent-facing version: your referral partners in the high-fallout metros are watching one in five of their contracts die, and a co-branded one-page piece showing your fallout rate against the metro average is the most persuasive business-development document you will send this quarter. If you do not track that number yet, start today — you will want it by October.
text every borrower currently between contract and closing their exact payment on today's rate, with one sentence on what has and has not changed since their pre-approval.