Home prices are falling in 6 major US cities and still rising in 14. Here's how the major markets are faring as buyers adjust to the end of the boom.

• A handful of cities are the first to show the housing market caving amid fading buyer demand.
• The six cities listed here are some of the largest in the US and have been in high demand in recent years.

The red-hot housing market has fizzled out — and that means home prices are finally cooling down.

Over the past few years, intense buyer competition has elevated home prices throughout the US but as affordability wanes, demand is fading fast. Indeed, higher housing costs have pushed out many would-be buyers, leading to a slowdown in home buying activity.

In a handful of cities, that downturn is already translating to cheaper homes. Data published from the S&P Dow Jones Indices shows that price growth has turned negative in six major metropolitan areas from April through July, reflecting a stark shift from last year's buying bonanza.

The following table shows the percent change in home prices from April 2022 through July 2022 for 20 US cities, as well as how prices changed year over year from July 2021 through July 2022.

California played host to three of the six cities that saw lower home prices in July compared to a few months prior in April. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego all experienced negative price growth during this period.

Prices tumbled the most in Seattle, where the S&P CoreLogic Index slid 4.4% during this time. Its southern neighbor Portland notched a 0.3% decline, just barely joining the group of cities with tumbling home prices. Denver also saw a similarly small decline from April through July, with a decline of 0.4%.

At the national level, US home prices rose 15.8% year-over-year in July, a few percentage points lower than the 18.1% year-over-year in June. Craig J. Lazzara, managing director at S&P Dow Jones Indices said that the "difference between those two monthly rates of gain is the largest deceleration in the history of the index."

As seen in the above table, Tampa and Miami in Florida experienced the largest year-over-year percent increases in July among the 20 metro areas, at 31.8% and 31.7% respectively. DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, saw the smallest increases during this time. When comparing year-over-year prices, no major US city is yet seeing a decrease.

"The theme of strong but decelerating prices was reflected across all 20 cities," Lazzara said. "July's year-over-year price change was positive for each one of the 20 cities, with a median gain of 15.0%, but in every case July's gain was less than June's."

Prospective buyers can thank the Federal Reserve for the market slowdown. The central bank has been raising interest rates at the fastest pace in four decades in hopes of cooling demand and countering inflation. Those rate hikes have affected borrowing costs throughout the economy, but few areas have shown as fast a response as the housing market. The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is now a staggering 6.7% — more than double the levels seen in 2021, and Fed officials have repeatedly hinted that more increases will come later this year.

That's already pulled some buyers out of the market. In August, nationwide new home sales fell 0.1% year over year to 685,000 units by month's end. During the same time period, existing home sales — a measure of sales volume and prices of existing housing inventory — plummeted to the slowest pace since November 2015 as only 4.8 million units were sold.

As buyer demand fades, sellers are losing their leverage in the housing market. With fewer people competing for homes, the US bidding war rate has fallen to the lowest level since April 2020. According to real estate database Redfin, only 44.6% of home offers faced competition in August — highlighting a startling shift in both home seller and buyer behavior.

"The bidding-war rate is falling as the housing market cools and buyers back off from the pandemic-driven home buying frenzy in 2021 and early 2022," Redfin researchers wrote in housing report, adding that "buyers are dropping out of the market and competition is dwindling" largely on volatile mortgage rate activity.