2026's Delisting Wave Never Showed Up. Work 2025's List Instead.

If your winter prospecting plan counts on a fresh pile of withdrawn listings, check the 2026 numbers before you buy the data. Last fall, sellers pulled homes at a record pace. Realtor.com counted 27 homes removed for every 100 new listings in October 2025, up from 20 a year earlier, and called 2025 the highest delisting year since it started tracking the metric in 2022. This year hasn't followed that script. Delistings ran below 2025's pace all summer, and Realtor.com put September's delisting rate at about 5.6% of homes on the market, in line with a year earlier. Sellers who would have quit last year are staying listed and cutting price instead. That shifts where your next listing appointments come from, and it turns the owners who pulled their homes in 2025 into the most underworked list in your database.

Are Sellers Still Pulling Listings This Fall?

Not at last year's rate. Realtor.com reported delistings down 8.3% year over year in June, 4.7% in July and 12.6% in August 2026, with removals holding near 5.5% of active inventory. September's rate of about 5.6% matched a year earlier. In 2026, sellers are staying on the market and cutting price rather than pulling out.

Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel put it plainly in the August report: "sellers are still showing more patience than they did during last year's late-summer delisting wave." The September report shows where that patience went. There were 1,161,615 active listings, up 5.4% from a year earlier, while new listings slipped 0.7% to 394,830 and pending sales fell 4.1%. The median home sat 61 days, and the median list price dropped 1.4% to $419,250, the 11th straight month of annual declines. Put those together and you get a market full of homes that are listed, aging and getting cheaper, but still under contract with whoever holds the listing. You can't prospect those owners. That's the catch for any agent whose winter plan was "wait for the withdrawals and call them in January," because the withdrawals you were counting on are mostly still on the MLS with someone else's sign in the yard.

Why 2025's Delisted Owners Are Your Best Winter List

The 2025 wave was big and uneven. Realtor.com's October 2025 data showed Miami removing 45 homes per 100 new listings (34 a year before), Denver 39 (up from 24) and Houston 37 (up from 31), against 27 nationally. Chief economist Danielle Hale summed up the year this way: "Rising delistings and the growth of refuge markets capture the push and pull defining today's housing market." For your farm, run a simple illustration. If your area sees 300 new listings a year and its removal ratio matched the national 27 per 100, that's 81 owners who listed, gave up and went quiet. Some relisted and sold. Some rented the place out. A meaningful share are still sitting in the same house a year later, with a price in their head that came from a 2025 market. Those owners already decided to sell once, which is more than you can say about most of the names in a cold farm list.

The math has also moved under them, which gives you a reason to call that isn't "are you still thinking of selling?" A homeowner who pulled a listing last fall was looking at a year-ago 30-year rate of 6.17%. Freddie Mac's survey put it at 7.24% on October 29, 2026. Their 2025 asking price is stale. National median list prices are down 1.4% from a year ago. Buyers are paying less and carrying a bigger payment while they do it. An owner can't get that conversation from a portal estimate. A fresh, written number with this year's comps is what gets you invited back into a decision they shelved, and your competitors aren't offering it because they're still waiting on this year's withdrawals.

A seller who pulled a home in 2025 already said yes to selling once. Your job is finding out what changed since.

How to Build the 2025 Withdrawn-Listing Campaign in Your CRM

What you'll build

You're building a tagged segment of every home in your farm that was withdrawn, canceled or expired between June and December 2025 and hasn't sold or relisted since, plus a 90-day touch plan that leads with a new valuation. It works in Follow Up Boss, BoldTrail, Lofty or any CRM that supports tags, custom fields and saved filters. The setup is a few hours of work, and once the segment exists you can refresh it every quarter as new withdrawals come in. If you already run an expired-listing routine, think of this as the slower, warmer cousin: these owners aren't fielding a wave of agent calls the morning after their listing died, because that morning was a year ago and every other agent moved on.

What you need before you start

• MLS search access to withdrawn, canceled and expired statuses with a date filter.
• A CRM with tags, at least two custom fields (last list price, date removed) and saved searches or smart lists.
• A Do Not Call scrub for every number you plan to dial.
• A home valuation page or funnel that drops the owner's request straight back into the CRM record.

Step by step

1. Pull the 2025 removals. Search your farm for withdrawn, canceled and expired listings with an off-market date from June 1 through December 31, 2025.
2. Remove anything that resolved. Drop every address that later sold or is currently active with another agent. Owners under a current listing agreement are off limits.
3. Import with context. Tag each record "2025-removed" and fill the custom fields with the last list price, total days on market and the removal date.
4. Scrub before you dial. Run every phone number against the national and state DNC lists, and start registered numbers on mail and door-knocking instead.
5. Lead with a then-vs-now number. Send each owner a one-page comparison of their 2025 list price against current local comps and this fall's price-cut share.
6. Run a 90-day cadence. Plan six touches across November through January, each one pointing to the valuation page, and move anyone who requests a number into your listing pipeline.

Mistakes That Burn This List

The fastest way to waste the segment is to dial it raw. Withdrawn and expired owners are exactly the group that tends to register on Do Not Call after a bad week of agent calls, and the fines attach per call, so read our breakdown of the DNC rules for calling expired listings before anyone on your team picks up a phone. The second mistake is pitching last year's price. If you open with "your home is worth what you listed it for," you've told the owner nothing they didn't already believe and you've anchored them to a number the September data says is too high in most markets. Third, don't treat the whole segment as one group. An owner who rented the home out needs a different message than one who moved a relative in or just stopped showing it. Fourth, skip the one-and-done postcard. A year-old decision rarely reopens on the first touch, and the agent who shows up in month three with a useful number usually gets the appointment.

For the scripting and data-source side of this work, our expired listing prospecting playbook covers where to pull owner contact data and what to say on the first call, and most of it carries straight over to withdrawn listings. The difference is tone. Expired scripts are built for urgency, while a 2025 withdrawal call works better as a market update with a question at the end. Ask what would have to be true for them to try again in spring, then write down the answer in the CRM record so the next touch speaks to it. That single field, filled in honestly, is worth more than any drip template because it tells you whether this owner is waiting on price, timing or a life event you can't control.

Adjust Your Own Listings for a Cut-Not-Quit Market

The same data that thins your prospect list should change how you manage the listings you already hold. In September, 36 of the 50 largest metros had a higher price-cut share than a year earlier, up from 27 in August. Salt Lake City led at 33.6%, followed by Denver at 32.1% and Portland, Oregon, at 31.6%, while New York sat at 10.3%. In the cutting markets, your seller is far more likely to stay on and reduce than to walk, so you need the price-review conversation scheduled before the listing goes live, not invented at day 45. Our post on updating your listing pitch for a 7-year inventory high has the presentation side of that, and if rates are reshaping your buyer side too, the pre-approval reset checklist covers what changed for buyers since August.

Where RobinFlow Fits in This Plan

Every step above ends at the same place: an owner asking what the house is worth today. Our home valuation funnel guide shows how to build that page so the request lands in your CRM with the owner's address already attached, which is the moment a 2025 withdrawal turns back into a 2026 listing appointment. RobinFlow builds those valuation funnels and runs the seller-lead campaigns behind them for agents and teams, so your winter list isn't limited to whoever happened to expire last week. If you'd rather spend your hours on appointments than on setting up landing pages and ad targeting, start your RobinFlow onboarding and have the funnel live before the spring listing season opens.

Frequently Asked Questions About 2026 Delistings

Are home delistings up or down in 2026?

Down for most of the year. Realtor.com's monthly reports showed year-over-year declines of 8.3% in June, 4.7% in July and 12.6% in August 2026, and the September delisting rate was roughly flat compared with 2025.

What was the delisting rate in 2025?

October 2025 delistings were up 37.9% from October 2024, and the ratio reached 0.27, meaning 27 removals for each 100 new listings nationally. Realtor.com called 2025 its highest delisting year since tracking began in 2022.

Can agents contact owners of withdrawn listings?

Yes, once the listing agreement has ended and the home isn't listed with another agent. Scrub phone numbers against federal and state Do Not Call registries first, and use mail or door-knocking for registered numbers.

What share of listings had price cuts in September 2026?

About one in five. Realtor.com measured 20.8% of active listings with a reduction, its highest September figure since 2018, and the West led all regions at 22.8%.

Sources: Realtor.com September 2026 Housing Report; Realtor.com August 2026 Housing Report; Realtor.com Monthly Housing Report, December 8, 2025; Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey.