Is now a good time to sell in Franklin?

The short answer depends far more on your house than on the month. 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. That works out to about four months of supply. Six months is what economists call balanced, and four is close enough that a buyer now has time to think.

People read balanced as falling. 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.

So what changed is the cost of a pricing mistake, not the value of your house. 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 fall, fix the price and the preparation before the photographer arrives. Neither one is a renovation. 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.