The home shopping season’s kick off has been buoyed by several factors, with housing market activity springing forward in March even as rising mortgage rates began to chip away at earlier affordability gains, according to the Zillow March Market Report.
Zillow said that pent-up demand from three years of low sales volume and winter storms in January and February, as well as the tailwind from lower mortgage rates earlier in the year, bolstered the market.
Zillow noted, however, that concerns over energy prices in March were the latest bit of uncertainty buyers faced since the onset of the pandemic.
The online brokerage said that mortgage rates climbed from 5.98% at the end of February to 6.38% in late March, citing Freddie Mac. That increase dug into affordability gains that had fueled optimism to start the year, Zillow noted. It said the typical mortgage payment rose 1.5% from February, excluding taxes and insurance.
Demand held firm, however, with average daily page views per for-sale listing on Zillow’s website were 32% higher than last March.
Pending Listings
Zillow reported that there were 281,546 newly pending listings in March, with only May 2025 having a higher total since August 2022. Both the 4.6% annual increase and 29.8% monthly increase are highs for March over the past five years, Zillow reported.
Meanwhile, Zillow said that home values continued to rise modestly, up 0.8% from a year earlier, a slight acceleration from February’s 0.4% annual growth. And, inventory rose on an annual basis for the 28th consecutive month, Zillow said.
New listings were essentially flat, up 0.1% year over year, which marked an improvement from January and February when new listings were below prior-year levels, Zillow said.
The typical U.S. home value is $365,545, Zillow said.
The Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) rose 0.6% month over month in March while home values are 0.8% higher than a year earlier.
The monthly mortgage payment on a typical U.S. home is $1,789, assuming a 20% down payment and excluding taxes and insurance. Zillow said that is 4.4% lower than last year.
Active Inventory Was Up
In terms of inventory, there were 1.23 million homes for sale nationwide in March, Zillow noted. Active inventory was 4.2% higher than a year earlier. Inventory rose 9.5% from February.
New for-sale listings totaled 384,854 in March, up 0.1% from a year earlier and up 35.6% from February.
Newly pending listings, which measures listings that changed from for-sale to pending status rather than closed sales, shows 4.6% growth from a year earlier and a 29.8% increase over February, Zillow said.
According to the preliminary Zillow sales count, 300,398 homes were sold in March, which is 3.7% higher than a year earlier and up 25.2% from February.
Homes took a median of 19 days to go pending in March, Zillow said. That was two days longer than a year earlier and nine days shorter than February, the website noted.
The share of listings with a price cut in March was 22.6%. That was down 0.8 percentage points from a year earlier and up 2.4 percentage points from February.
Zillow noted that the typical rent nationwide is $1,910, according to the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI). That’s 1.8% higher than a year earlier and up 0.6% from February, Zillow noted. It said that 39.8% of rental listings on Zillow offered a concession in March, which is flat from a year earlier and up 0.6 percentage points from February.
Local data can be found on Zillow’s market explorer.
