Nashville is one of the top housing markets for buyers
Home sellers in Nashville outnumber buyers almost two to one, according to the latest estimates from Redfin.
Why it matters: It's a buyer's market in real estate, if you can afford it. The swell of options on the market is a major reversal from just a few years ago, when homebuyers were desperate to find a place to live, sending prices into the stratosphere.
The big picture: The trend is happening nationwide, but Nashville provides an even starker example of the shift. Middle Tennessee is one of the top 10 buyers markets in the country, according to Redfin.
By the numbers: There were 90% more sellers than buyers in the Nashville area in April, per the data. The national gap is around 34%.
The trend toward more sellers in the market is the strongest since Redfin started tracking the metric in 2013.
Flashback: Just two years ago, the dynamic was flipped, with buyers outnumbering sellers.
Between the lines: A buyers market offers shoppers more options and leverage to negotiate on price. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of homes in the Nashville area sold under asking price in the first part of the year, per Redfin.
Reality check: Buying a home is still far out of reach for many Nashvillians. A report released earlier this year found that buyers had to make $120,000 annually in order to afford the median-priced home in Middle Tennessee.
A one-two punch of still high home prices and high mortgage rates has made it hard for buyers, especially first-timers, to find a place they can afford.
Add to that the extreme economic uncertainty of 2025, when tariff news, layoff fears and layoffs have tamped down buyer demand.
State of play: The median price for a single-family home in the Nashville area in April was $467,178, which is about even with the price a year ago, according to Redfin.
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5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today.
In March, Rocket, America's largest mortgage lender, announced plans to buy Redfin, a national brokerage that's spent its 20-year history trying to 'redefine' residential real estate. There are big numbers involved: Redfin's website attracts nearly 50 million views every month; Rocket says it handles more than 100,000 calls every day. The deal is worth nearly $1.75 billion. But Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies, say the consumer is at the heart of the deal. 'Homeownership is fundamentally a human business,' Krishna said during a May investor call. Still, the tie-up comes at an auspicious time. As USA TODAY has reported, there are deep fissures in the industry about how much control any one company should have over how real estate listings are shared publicly and who should represent buyers and sellers. At the same time, higher-for-longer mortgage rates and elevated home prices are fraying the American Dream, and making profits and margins challenging, as Kelman memorably noted in a 2024 call with analysts. USA TODAY sat down with Krishna and Kelman for one of their first joint appearances since the announcement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. USA TODAY: What does the acquisition mean for consumers in the housing market, for buyers and sellers? Varun Krishna: Today when you think about the process of buying or selling a home, the consumer sort of gets handed off from industry to industry to industry. One industry helps them with the process of searching for a home and working with a realtor, another industry helps them with the process of financing. Within that, there are industries that help them with things like title, insurance and then they get kind of handed off into the servicing business where they spend a lifetime handling things like property taxes, their monthly payments and their escrows. And the whole process is just so complicated. It takes time, it takes energy, it's expensive. What we want to do is fix that. We want to take something that is expensive, manual, and antiquated, and we just want to make it all seamless and frictionless, and ultimately create more savings and value for the Kelman: The central economic problem that people under 40 have is that they don't believe in the American Dream anymore. They can't afford a house, they get lost in the process, they get overwhelmed by the fees. They're spending half their down payment on the broker and the banker. And I do think we can fix that. USA TODAY: The start-to-finish real estate experience has been a Holy Grail for a long time. We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the , we know that homeowners , pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rocket buys Redfin. Here's what its CEOs told USA Today Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
There's a record $700 billion of homes for sale in the US. Here's why the market is still frozen.
The aggregate value of homes for sale in the US has climbed to $700 billion, an all-time high. Despite the flood of inventory, buyers haven't been lured to the market in 2025. This year was supposed to see a burst of buying activity, but macro uncertainty has kept the market frozen. 2025 was supposed to be a better year for the US housing market. But midway through, it's still stuck in low gear. After the worst year for home sales since 1995, there are scant few signs of life in the market. Even a record amount of unsold inventory hasn't lured buyers in. According to Redfin data released this month, sellers in the US are sitting on $700 billion of unsold housing stock, the highest dollar amount ever. Going by the number of homes for sale across the country, inventory is at a five-year high. Also, 44% of listings — or about $331 billion worth of homes for sale — have been on the market for over 60 days, the highest share since 2020. So, where are all the homebuyers? It's not the usual order of events. Often, with a deluge of inventory, prices edge down, but they're still creeping higher. In April, Redfin said prices rose 1.4% nationally even as the number of homes for sale jumped almost 17%. "House hunters are only buying if they absolutely have to, and even serious buyers are backing out of contracts more than they used to," a Redfin real estate agent in Denver said. Apart from prices, the other factor is mortgage rates. They're still too high for most buyers to stomach. The 30-year mortgage, which is tied to the 10-year Treasury yield, has barely budged this year. It's hovering just below 7%, and top forecasters expect the rate to end this year only slightly lower. Goldman Sachs analysts last week said they see the rate on the most popular home loan dipping to 6.75% by year-end, from 6.9% currently. After analysts initially predicted rates to cool this year as inflation ebbed and the Federal Reserve loosened monetary policy, forecasts have jumped again. That's because the uncertain impact of Donald Trump's tariff policy has led to a repricing in the bond market and scrambled predictions for the Fed to cut rates. Markets now see the first cut of 2025 coming in September, according to the CME FedWatch Tool. A gap between the "soft" and "hard" data points has been a big theme this year, with weak consumer sentiment and inflation expectations at odds with the backward-looking data that the Fed uses to inform policy. The general feeling of anxiety stemming from things like tariffs, the path of inflation, and the overall economy is fueling the weak demand in the US housing market. "In an instance like today, where markets are simply volatile, but not necessarily declining, that pure uncertainty also has a dampening effect on the housing market," Redfin's head of economic research, Chen Zhao, wrote in a separate report last month. Zhao continued: "First, bond market volatility directly increases the difference between 30-year mortgage rates and 10-year treasury yields, pushing mortgage rates up." Consumers and investors will get key updates on inflation and sentiment this week. May inflation data is due out on Wednesday, while the latest consumer sentiment reading will be published on Friday. Read the original article on Business Insider Sign in to access your portfolio
USA Today
7 hours ago
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Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today.
Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today. Show Caption Hide Caption How to clean your carpet and rugs properly Rugs and carpets can trap odors. Here's how to clean them properly. ProblemSolved, Reviewed In March, Rocket, America's largest mortgage lender, announced plans to buy Redfin, a national brokerage that's spent its 20-year history trying to 'redefine' residential real estate. There are big numbers involved: Redfin's website attracts nearly 50 million views every month; Rocket says it handles more than 100,000 calls every day. The deal is worth nearly $1.75 billion. But Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies, say the consumer is at the heart of the deal. 'Homeownership is fundamentally a human business,' Krishna said during a May investor call. Still, the tie-up comes at an auspicious time. As USA TODAY has reported, there are deep fissures in the industry about how much control any one company should have over how real estate listings are shared publicly and who should represent buyers and sellers. At the same time, higher-for-longer mortgage rates and elevated home prices are fraying the American Dream, and making profits and margins challenging, as Kelman memorably noted in a 2024 call with analysts. USA TODAY sat down with Krishna and Kelman for one of their first joint appearances since the announcement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. USA TODAY: What does the acquisition mean for consumers in the housing market, for buyers and sellers? Varun Krishna: Today when you think about the process of buying or selling a home, the consumer sort of gets handed off from industry to industry to industry. One industry helps them with the process of searching for a home and working with a realtor, another industry helps them with the process of financing. Within that, there are industries that help them with things like title, insurance and then they get kind of handed off into the servicing business where they spend a lifetime handling things like property taxes, their monthly payments and their escrows. And the whole process is just so complicated. It takes time, it takes energy, it's expensive. What we want to do is fix that. We want to take something that is expensive, manual, and antiquated, and we just want to make it all seamless and frictionless, and ultimately create more savings and value for the Kelman: The central economic problem that people under 40 have is that they don't believe in the American Dream anymore. They can't afford a house, they get lost in the process, they get overwhelmed by the fees. They're spending half their down payment on the broker and the banker. And I do think we can fix that. USA TODAY: The start-to-finish real estate experience has been a Holy Grail for a long time. We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the vast majority do have fixed-rate mortgages, we know that homeowners insurance costs are rising pretty dramatically, pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back
