Is now a good time to sell in Franklin?

The short answer is that it depends far more on your house than on the month, and anybody who answers it without seeing the house is guessing. But the market itself is easier to describe than people expect.

The median residential sale across the nine counties was $520,000 in July, down from $537,000 in June, and days on market went from 51 to 54. Set those against 10,584 residential listings and 2,627 residential closings, which works out to about four months of supply. That last number is the one worth understanding, because six months is what economists call balanced and four is close enough that a buyer now has time to think.

Here is what people get wrong about it. They read balanced as falling, and it is not the same thing. Prices did not drop. What came back is time. A house that would have sold in a weekend two years ago now takes a few weeks, and sellers who priced for the weekend market are the ones sitting.

Which means the thing that has changed is not what your house is worth. It is how much a pricing mistake costs you. In a two-day market, an overpriced house still sold, just a bit later. In a balanced market, an overpriced house goes stale, and stale houses sell for less than they would have if they had been priced correctly on day one.

So if you are listing this autumn, the two things I would fix before the photographer arrives are not renovations. They are the price and the preparation. Get an honest number with the comparable sales behind it, and finish the cleaning and the paint before anybody takes a photograph, because those images stay on the internet for the life of the listing.

Ask me for the numbers on your specific street rather than the nine-county figure. That is the one that actually tells you anything.