Buyer Demand in Rutherford County Is Up 30% While Sellers Sit Out Peak Season

Note: the new-listing counts in this transcript reflect the final figures for the week ending June 13, 2026. The percentage decline and the analysis match the video.

Home buyer demand is accelerating in Rutherford County. This is something we have been talking about all year, but the latest stats are very intriguing. We will be talking about that and other things you need to know about the Rutherford County real estate market. I am John Turner. I am the team leader of the Turner Victory Team at Onward Real Estate. And we bring you this information every week. Let’s jump into the three things you need to know about the Rutherford County real estate market right now.

Number one, not only has demand been positive for every month this year with new pendings up every month, but this week pendings were up 30% over the same week last year. That is 30 percent. And the way it has worked out is very interesting because early in the year, January through March, our new contracts were up 5 to 7%. But once we got into April and May we hit 12% for both of those months and right now we are seeing 30% this week here in June. So not only has it been increasing, it has actually been building over this time. Very interesting, and something we have continued to watch all year.

The second thing you need to know about the Rutherford County real estate market is that sellers are actually sitting out this market. It is really interesting. Our new listings continue to be down. We had 182 this week. That is 182 new listings hit the market. This time last year we had 265 units come on board. So that is a drop of 32%. So pendings are up 30% this week and new listings are down 32%. That is a trend we have seen pretty much all year.

The third thing you need to know about the Rutherford County real estate market is pricing. That is still the deciding factor even though demand is up. There are a lot of homes that are sitting on the market and you really get penalized when you do that. Almost 36% of the homes right now have taken a price reduction. So that tells me that buyers are out there. If you are a seller, buyers are out there. They are looking for homes but they are not going to overpay. They are looking for something that is priced right. So if you are overpriced as a seller, your home is not going to sell. But if you price right, present right, your agent promotes it right, and you position it right compared to all your competition, the demand is there and your home will sell. And quite frankly it is probably going to sell fairly quickly if you hit all those marks.

Let me jump over here. So this week right now we have 1,580 homes on the market. The Turner Victory Team Health Score is a 51, which means we are a balanced market. It actually ticked up slightly this week in favor of sellers, but overall a very balanced market. Months of supply is 3.63. The 30-year rate right now is 6.52%. It is the highest we have seen it in a little while, still down quite a bit from this time last year. Now as I am taping this, supposedly there is a deal in the Middle East. If that happens I would expect oil prices to continue to drop which is going to help inflation numbers and therefore I would expect it to help mortgage rates. Of course it has been so hard to predict what mortgage rates are going to do over the past two or three years.

If you look at the different price ranges, first of all 1,580 homes on the market. Almost 35% of those are new construction. So over a third of all available homes are new construction. New listings that hit the market were 182, while 126 went under contract. More homes came on than went under contract, so inventory kept building. The ones priced right come on and they leave. The ones that are not priced right, not presented right, they are still sitting out here in inventory. Those are building up. But all the good homes are coming on and going fairly quickly. We had 84 closings last week and 85 homes got delisted.

What I want to look at is our active inventory in the 500 to 600,000 price range. Right now 45% of all the homes on the market are new construction. So if someone looks at your house as a resale seller, there is a good chance they are also looking at new construction. Whenever they walk into your house it needs to feel like new construction. Maybe you have a fence, maybe you are on a bigger lot, you have established landscaping. You know whatever it is you may have an advantage. But people are walking in and making a choice between your home and a brand new one.

Also we can talk about the two markets we are in. Anything below 500,000 right now is moving quickly, especially below 400,000. Below 400,000 is definitely a seller’s market. But once you get above 500,000 we start getting into slower territory. Above 1 million is definitely much slower.

Active inventory is still climbing even though homes are coming on and going off pretty quickly. We are at 1,580 units. This is almost the highest we have been in a while. We did hit 1,603 as the highest in the past year. I would anticipate we are probably going to build a little bit past that 1,600 number but I am not thinking we will go up a lot above that. If you look at months of supply though, the months of supply is almost even with what it was last year. So our market from an inventory standpoint is about like it was last year. The difference is the momentum is building with this market, whereas this time last year we were actually losing momentum. Last summer was very slow. So even though the numbers are close, the way the market is moving is different.

New listings: we continue every week to be below 2024 and 2025 numbers. If you look at this orange line you have to go back to February to find a single week where we had more new listings hit the market than we did last year. That is 16 straight weeks bringing on less new listings than what we did for the same period last year.

The pendings: for several weeks now we have been above what we were last year. All but basically three weeks of the year we have exceeded pendings from this time last year. The only reason week 5 was down is because that was the week we had the ice storm back in February.

On the speed of sale, the blue represents homes that go under contract in the first seven days. As a seller that is what you want. We have this conversation a lot with sellers, but sometimes they think if I sell too early that means I priced it too low. No, that does not mean that. What it means is there are a lot of people in the market right now looking for a house, and if you price it right and present it right, someone is going to want to buy it. But if you do not present it right or price it right, they are going to pass over it. That is what we call a passover house. We have a lot of those. People have seen them and just passed over them because they did not hit one of the right marks. What you want is to be in that first seven days. Right now 31% of all homes that hit the market in Rutherford County are selling in that first week.

Once you hit 90 days or more, only 18% of the homes are selling then. As a matter of fact, 61.7% of all homes that hit the 90-day mark in Rutherford County did not sell under that same MLS number. Of that 61.7%, 51.1% never sold at all. Only 10.5% actually did sell under another MLS number. Right now in Rutherford County we have 437 homes that have hit the 90-day mark or above. That is over 27% of our market. Out of that 28%, nearly two out of three of those homes will not sell. Very sobering, but it just tells you exactly what our market is doing right now.

Here is the deal with prices. I get asked this all the time, when are prices going to crash? The data does not show that. Home prices are remaining level. Unless there is a huge increase in inventory I do not see prices coming down much. New listings hitting the market are way down this year. So by new listings being down and demand being up, even though mortgage rates are higher than people would like, it is really helping keep our prices steady. We have not seen a huge increase in price and we have not seen a huge decrease in price. So if you are waiting for prices to crash, you are probably just hurting yourself. But if you are a seller and you think we have seen the appreciation we saw in previous years, you are wrong too. If you bought your house two years ago it is probably worth about the same thing now. It really does not matter what you want for the house. It matters what it is worth.

I hope this information helps. We try to give you a little insight into whether you are buying or selling, how the market affects you. If you have any specific questions about your situation, please reach out to us. Our team loves using this data to help you understand the market. If you understand the market you are able to make good educated decisions. You may not like where we are in the market or you may like it, but what matters is you understand what is going on. Please comment if you have any specific questions or reach out to me directly at john at turnervictory dot com. You can also visit our website at TurnerVictory.com. As always we appreciate you tuning in. We bring this to you every week and until next week I hope you go out and make it a great week.