Snow Days Failed To Freeze Up Nashville’s Housing Market

The ice and snow of February failed to freeze up the Nashville area’s housing market. Closings jumped nearly 13 percent from the same period last year and March is on track to keep the upward trend going.

Winter is traditionally the slow season for real estate, but school speech therapist Jack Henderson says he and his wife strategically chose to buy their first house now.

“I know that in the spring time, there’s more houses on the market but there’s also more buyers,” he says. “So we felt like doing it in the offseason would be more of a buyer’s market.”

The Hendersons did have to compete with one other bidder for the house they bought in East Nashville’s Cleveland Park. That’s no surprise since the Greater Nashville Association of Realtors reports the inventory of homes in the range of first-time buyers is particularly low.

Not only did closings withstand the cold in February, potential buyers made it out against the snow as well. The number of pending deals set to close in March is also up over the prior year.

“Remarkably, the market was essentially not phased,” GNAR president Cindy Stone said in a statement. “As January did before it, this February saw its best monthly sales numbers since 2007.”

The median price did slip a bit compared to previous months at $206,000. That’s up from $189,000 over the same month in 2014 but is down from $215,000 in January.