Headline: “Housing panic grips half of US cities as record price cuts send home values tumbling.” What does the text of the story say?

Sellers are slashing prices at record rates to to lure hesitant buyers put off by soaring mortgage rates and economic uncertainty.

In July alone, 27.4 percent of listings had a price cut — the highest rate ever recorded in Zillow’s monthly data going back to 2018.  

It helped push prices down year-over-year in 25 of the 50 largest US cities. Most were in the South and West…

Tampa prices are down 6.2 percent, Austin 6 percent, Miami 4.6 percent, Orlando 4.3 percent and Dallas 3.9 percent, according to Zillow…

Price cuts are more common in the South and the Mountain region, according to Zillow, as homeowners desperately try to offload properties.

Summary of this data: these are “record” cuts, supported by the number of listings with a price cut (27.4%), the number of metro areas with price cuts (half of the largest cities), and four specific cities have had prices drop between 3.9% and 6.2%.

This may be unusual behavior compared to prior years. It might not be what property owners want to see. Is it a “housing panic”?

Here are several indicators I could imagine of a larger panic regarding housing values:

1. Prices dropping across all or most metro areas. (We read later in the article that values are up in some metros, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest.)
2. Price drops of more than 10%. This may be an arbitrary cut-off but it is at least double-digits.
3. Consistent public reporting and/or conversation about a housing panic. If there was truly a panic, wouldn’t it be easy to find that conversation?
4. An inability to sell many homes even with larger price cuts.

This is worth paying attention to, both for the actual figures and how they are interpreted.