The 615 Market Brief

What this actually means

Supply is the number worth watching, not the median. Greater Nashville REALTORS counted 10,532 residential listings on the market against 2,306 residential closings in August, which works out to 4.6 months of supply. July was 4.0 on the same arithmetic. Six months is the textbook definition of balanced, so we are still short of it, and half a month of that distance closed in a single release.

The median moved down from July, $515,725 against $520,000, which is less than one percent, and days from list to contract moved from 54 to 55. One month is not a trend and I am not going to sell it as one. What those two figures describe together is a market where the buyer has time, and that 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 and a half 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 2,409 homes under contract at the end of August against 2,454 at the end of July, and condominiums ran a separate market entirely at a $339,995 median across 438 closings, above the $334,900 they posted in July even as their closings fell. A condo and a house in this region are not moving together, and a single regional median hides that completely.