The Nashville real estate market remained in the doldrums in August, as home sales finished the summer at essentially the same pace as in recent months.
The Greater Nashville Association of Realtors said Tuesday that the number of properties sold last month was down 32 percent compared with a year ago, with 2,273 single-family homes, condos, multifamily properties, farms and lots changing hands.
Meanwhile, the median price of a single-family home sold in August was down 6 percent from a year ago, about as much as in June and July. The median home price was $177,500.
Inventory also stayed the same. A total of 24,975 residential properties were on the market at the end of August, down two-tenths of a percentage point from July.
"I think mostly people are hanging in there," said Mandy Wachtler, the Realtor association's president. "We have a fairly — I don't want to say a tough market — a fairly stable market."
The August figures painted a familiar picture of the Nashville real estate market.
Apart from seasonal variation — sales slowing in the fall and picking up again each spring — the volume of monthly deals has barely changed since last September, when the housing slump that began on the East and West coasts finally came to Middle Tennessee.
Unlike the hardest hit cities in California and Florida, where glutted markets have led to dramatic declines in home values, slower sales have only recently begun to translate into reduced prices in Tennessee.
Area still a 'bright spot'Heading into the spring, home prices in the Nashville metropolitan area were down only 0.1 percent, according to the Fiserv Case-Shiller Index, a measure that tracks same-home sale prices going back to the 1970s.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Fiserv predicts home prices in Nashville will drop 2.7 percent more from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of next year.
The area remains a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy real estate market nationally, said David Stiff, the firm's chief economist.
"Bright spot is a relative term right now," he said. "When you have markets that have 30 percent declines and your market holds (its) own, that's a bright spot."
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