In what is often the busiest month for home buying in the Nashville area, the number of closings dropped by 3.3 percent. Realtors say it’s not that demand is fading, but that it may be too high.
Homebuyers have some horror stories at the moment. Recording studio manager Aaron Beaird looked for months. He made nine offers from Donelson to East Nashville to South Nashville. If he didn’t offer ten or twenty thousand dollars above the asking price, he says sellers scoffed. Before bidding on the house he ultimately bought this week, Beaird says he vowed to walk away.
“Literally I said if we don’t get this house, then we’ll just wait a year or whenever the market cools down,” he says. “Because this is just crazy.”
As it stands, there are way more buyers in the Nashville area than the number of houses for sale can support. That high demand and low inventory pushed the median sale price to another record in July — $267,000.
Yet realtors believe the competitive market also contributed to fewer deals closing. A similar phenomenon was
blamed for Williamson County’s dip in June. Denise Creswell is president of the Greater Nashville Association of Realtors and says she’s not concerned.
“The market cannot sustain the activity that we’ve experienced over the long haul,” she says. “At some point, there’s going to have to be some stability occurring.”
Creswell says it’s too early to tell whether this was just a one-month correction or perhaps the beginning of a longer-term leveling out.
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