What Is Normal for Showings Per Listing in Rutherford County?

When we talk about homes on the market in Rutherford County, I get this question a lot. I see it in the forums, agents come up and ask me, and they start asking about showings. Are showings up? Are they down? What they are trying to do is gauge their clients’ listings and see whether they are beating the norm or not. A lot of times these questions come from scarcity, from feeling like we are not having many showings.

I am John Turner, team leader of the Turner Victory Team at Onward Real Estate. We bring you the Murfreesboro Real Estate Report every week, and this week we are talking about showings and what is going on in the market. There is one particular price point where we have seen some really interesting data, so we want to bring that to you as well.

When we talk about showings, we are talking about in person showings. As an industry, ever since the pandemic we have done a better job of presenting homes online. Naturally that has led to fewer showings, because a buyer can look online and rule a lot of houses out where before they could not. So if we could account for all of that over the years, I would expect the number of showings to be down no matter what market we are in.

With that said, most people are telling me they feel like showings are slow right now, and the data agrees with that.

This chart shows showings per listing. We started keeping up with this earlier this year, so I do not have all the historical data. I wish I did, but we can only go with what we have. You can see we peaked at a little above one and a half in late spring and early summer. Then it started dropping off, and right now any listing on the market is averaging about three quarters of a showing per week. Not even a full showing per week per listing.

The dotted line is something we just started looking at this week. One is the median and one is the mean. Do not get too hung up on that. You can see how the lines go together, even growing a little closer right here. But then we started seeing a discrepancy between the two, one still going down and one moving up. What that tells us is that even though showings per listing are going down on average, not all price points are actually going down. Some are bucking the trend.

That is what I want to look at, because we created a couple of new charts. The gray bar is average showings four weeks ago, per listing, per price bucket. Under $300,000 the average was 2.02 for the week of July 18th through the 24th. Now it has increased to 2.38. So we have seen showings increase in the under $300,000 range. We have seen them decrease in the three to four hundreds and the four to five hundreds. They drop down through the six hundreds fairly evenly, but we did see a slight increase there, and above a million we actually saw quite a bit of an increase.

That is one way to look at it. We are comparing one point in time to another point in time, so it helps but it is not the best way to do it. So we put a trend on it. This is a four week trend by price point, going back from the middle of July until now. If you are under $300,000, the average listing has gained 0.88 showings per listing, so almost one more showing per listing over those four weeks. You can see the same trend in the three to four hundred thousands, where things have picked up, whereas the four to six hundreds have dropped down.

Anywhere between four and eight hundred thousand, those lines are not really big enough. I call that almost dead even. But it is interesting to see which way price ranges are trending, and I think that plays into a lot of what we are going to look at today.

This week the Turner Victory Team Market Health Score is at 40. That is definitely down from where it has been. We are still calling it a balanced market, but a buyer leaning market. Thirty nine is what we call a buyer’s market, so our market has definitely trended toward buyers over the past several weeks. We have 1,651 homes on the market right now, 3.44 months supply across the board, and the 30 year fixed mortgage rate is 6.66%. That remains elevated over its low back in February.

This is broken down by price range. The light blue is new construction, the percentage of that category that is new construction. For instance, of the 126 active homes below $300,000, almost 12% are new construction. There were six new listings this week and six pended, so we basically pended what we brought on.

You can see that 132 homes hit the market, only 96 went under contract, and 97 closed. We did have 117 actually leave the market and get delisted. So we had more go off the market because they were pulled or expired than we actually had go under contract. That is something I think is interesting to watch. We have been watching it every week, and it seems like there are more people either getting frustrated and pulling their house off the market, or their listing expired, or they pulled it off to regather themselves and put it back on later.

The really interesting thing is this orange area right here. That represents the five hundreds, the six hundreds, and the seven hundreds. Over the past year or so, the six and seven hundreds have really been up in this yellow. But the interesting thing is that the five hundreds has really grown. Right now there are 337 active listings in that range and 4.79 months supply, almost five months of supply in the five hundreds.

That seems to be where I am hearing most of the frustration, from my fellow agents and from people in the Realtor forums for this county, because they have clients in that price range trying to sell. It is a tough price range. Only 13 homes closed last week and only 11 homes out of 337 went under contract at that price point. It really has bottlenecked right there.

Why is that? Great question. I would submit to you it is one of three things.

Number one, mortgage rates. We know they have gone up, so it is less affordable for people trying to move to that price point. Maybe in March it was affordable for them to go there, but now that rates have gone up they just cannot reach that market.

Number two, some buyers, and I hear this a lot, say I just do not think that house is worth that. Now, the market tells us what something is worth. You have a willing buyer and a willing seller and they agree on something. But if one of those parties feels like the house is not worth it, then the market is saying that house is not worth that price, even though you may have comps that support it. The mentality has changed a little bit across our county right now.

The third thing, and it goes hand in hand, is that I still think there are a lot of people out there with aspirational pricing. A lot of sellers feel like, well, I could have gotten this for it, so I still want to try for this. You really have to look at market conditions and see what is going on.

The other thing you have to look at is that almost 44% of what is on the market in that range right now is new construction. So if you are a reseller trying to sell in that market, you are competing against something that feels like a model home because it is brand new. You need to look like a model home. But builders are also, I mean, I do not think there is any builder out there who is probably not paying closing costs right now. On top of that, a lot of them are able to offer special incentives. Some of them are giving financing. As a matter of fact, there are still builders out there where you get 4.99% financing. Whenever you are a buyer looking at six and a half percent versus 4.99, that makes a huge difference not only in your payment but in what you can afford.

So there may be buyers out there who can afford the five hundreds if they are getting a 4.99% mortgage rate. But if they are not, they may not be able to get into the five hundreds. They may be buyers there in the four hundreds. All of that comes into play. It is not just what your neighbor’s house sold for and you trying to price that way. And then we have the showings dropping off. There is a lot of competition out there right now, so as a seller you really need to take all of that into consideration.

Buyers, I hope what you are hearing is opportunity. There are a lot of opportunities out there. There are people who have been trying to sell who I think want to sell, and if they are getting honest about pricing, you may be able to work a really good deal, especially if someone has been in their house a while and has a lot of equity.

That right there is the one thing that is different in this market versus 2008. I hear people all the time talking about 2008. Two things. Looking at active inventory, our inventory is up, but not nearly what it was in 2008. We had a lot more inventory per capita. Think about how much Rutherford County has grown since 2008. Per capita, the inventory is not nearly as high as it was. Plus, in 2008 very few people had equity. We did not have the run up of the pandemic years where people gained so much equity in their homes. So as a buyer, there are people out there who have equity and maybe they are willing to make a deal. I certainly think there are plenty of opportunities out there if you are in the market right now.

Speaking of active inventory, ours continues to build up a little. We are not quite as high as we were four weeks ago, but we are almost there. We are kind of expecting that drop off as we go into fall. We normally see that most years, and we definitely saw it last year. It feels like it is a little later this time, but if you look back at 2024 and 2023, we really did not hit that drop off until much later in the year either.

It is going to be interesting to see, with as few new listings as we have had coming on the market, I really expected this inventory to start dropping off. But I think the velocity of homes going under contract has continued to keep it up. Some of that has to do with what we have seen with our pendings over the last seven weeks.

Months supply is still mirroring basically what we did last year, except we are seeing a slight gap right here. That gap is really because of what we have seen with pendings. Because our new listings are down, I mean, the past ten weeks were below any numbers we saw in the past two years as far as listings coming on the market. So you would think our inventory would start dropping off. The reason it has not is our pendings. If you look at our pendings, that is seven weeks we have been below where we were last year, except for one week where we actually tied it. Does that change or not? I kind of thought we might be headed up a couple weeks ago, but it seems like that July slumber is still slumbering into August.

Buyers, pay attention to the Market Health Score. We have only been at 50 once this year. As we go down on the Turner Victory Team Market Health Score, that is telling us the market is trending more toward buyers. We look at a lot of different things that go into that score, some local data and some national data. What it tells you as a buyer is that there are more and more opportunities. So if you are thinking about entering the market, the Turner Victory Team Market Health Score says it is getting better and better for you.

On active inventory, the four hundreds to five hundreds have built up some. We have more inventory there than we have in the five to six hundreds. The difference is we have more sales going on right now in the four hundreds than we do in the five hundreds. So even though our inventory level is up a little more there, our actual months supply for the four hundreds is below the five hundreds.

Mainly I wanted to talk to you about the showings. It is very interesting when we broke it down that way. That was a fun chart to see whether our showings are getting more or less. We will continue to bring that to you. Please remember we bring this information to you every week. I know our subscribers continue to grow, so please subscribe, please share it, and please let us know if you have any questions. We are more than happy to answer those as well.

I am John Turner, team leader of the Turner Victory Team at Onward Real Estate. We appreciate you tuning in this week, and until next week, we hope you make it a great week.