The 615 Market Brief

What this actually means

Supply is the number worth watching, not the median. Greater Nashville REALTORS counted 10,584 residential listings on the market against 2,627 residential closings in July, which is right at four months of supply. Six months is the textbook definition of balanced, so we are still short of it, but four months is a different market from the one that ran on six-week supply a few years ago.

The median moved down from June, $520,000 against $537,000, and days on market moved up from 51 to 54. One month is not a trend and I am not going to sell it as one. Read those two together and what they describe is a market where buyers have time to think, which is the part that changes how a house has to be priced.

So what changed is not what your house is worth. What changed is the cost of pricing it wrong. In a two-day market an overpriced house still sold, a little later. With four months of supply on the shelf it goes stale, and stale houses close below where they would have if they had been priced correctly on the first day.

Two more figures from the same release, because they say something the median cannot. There were 2,454 homes under contract at the end of July, and condominiums ran a separate market entirely at a $334,900 median across 456 closings. A condo and a house in this region are not moving together, and a single regional median hides that completely.