Today’s track: Vivir Mi Vida — Marc Anthony
Football season starts and everybody assumes real estate goes quiet. It doesn’t. It just moves.
Sunday’s still the open house day. It’s also kickoff day. Agents everywhere are scheduling around it now — check the slate before you lock a time, because a home game or a 1 p.m. window against a rival will thin your traffic faster than rain will. I know agents who’ve stopped fighting it and started calling the open house a watch party instead. TV on, food on the counter, come look at the primary suite at halftime.
Showings are the quieter version of the same thing. Weekday evenings barely notice football season — nobody’s rescheduling a Tuesday 6 p.m. walkthrough for anything. But block off a Sunday afternoon during a marquee game and you’ll feel it: fewer requests, more “can we push to Monday” texts. It’s not that buyers stop looking. It’s that the ones who’d rather watch the game just… watch the game. The serious ones show up anyway.
Here’s the one that actually surprised me: roughly one in five NFL fans say their team loyalty factors into where they choose to live. Not decorating. Deciding. Proximity to the stadium. A neighborhood that flies the right colors. Cowboys fans in Dallas-Fort Worth will pay up to be near AT&T Stadium the same way some buyers pay up to be near a good school. Somebody relocating for work will pick a side before they pick a school district. People tell you they’re rational buyers. Then they pass on the better floor plan because it’s two exits from the wrong stadium.
Football doesn’t shrink the housing market — it just moves the furniture.
One day everybody actually agrees on: Super Bowl Sunday. Ask any agent and you’ll hear the same thing — it’s historically one of the single lowest-showing days of the entire year, regular season included. A normal Sunday game dents your numbers. The Super Bowl erases them. I’ve never once had a showing request land between 6 and 9 p.m. that day, and I’m not expecting this year to be the exception.
Locally it’s Cards and Cats, not Cowboys and Eagles, and Kentucky Sports Radio treats a home game like a public holiday. I’ve had showings booked for 9 a.m. specifically because the buyer needed to be tailgating by noon. I don’t fight it. I just work around it, the same way I’d work around a wedding or a funeral — it’s just what’s on the calendar that week.
Multiple-offer situations follow the calendar more than they follow the football schedule, but the two overlap enough that people give football the credit. September through December isn’t the dead zone people assume. Fewer buyers show up — but the ones who do are serious, and that combination is exactly what cools off bidding wars. Less competition per listing, sellers who need to close before year-end, and — the part nobody says out loud — buyers with more room to negotiate instead of waiving everything just to win. We’re sitting at 2.61 months of supply in Louisville right now, the most breathing room we’ve had all year (I broke that whole report down Monday). That’s not football’s doing. It just lands right when the games start, and every year somebody tells me the market “always slows down for football season” like it’s a law of nature instead of a coincidence of the calendar. I wrote a few weeks back about letting the calendar do the negotiating for you — fall is that idea wearing a jersey.
Preapprovals don’t actually stop for football, whatever the assumption is. They just get weirder timing. I get more preapproval texts during commercial breaks than during business hours in the fall — somebody’s half-watching the game, a listing pops up on their phone, and it’s “can we get preapproved for this” at 8:47 on a Sunday night. The lenders who actually answer in the fourth quarter — pun intended — win a disproportionate number of those buyers. Speed’s the whole game year-round. Football season just makes it visible, because you can watch it happen in real time on a Sunday instead of guessing at it on a Tuesday.
And if you want the wildest version of all this: college towns that go all-in on Saturday football have investors buying up single-family homes purely to rent out on game weekends. Athens, Georgia went from 865 short-term rental listings to over 1,100 in about a year, chasing the 90,000 people who show up eight Saturdays a season. It’s pricing out actual residents in Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, and Oxford too — homes bought, flipped into rentals, and left empty most of the year. Louisville’s nowhere close to that — we don’t have 90,000 people descending on one stadium eight times a fall — but it’s a real preview of what happens when a housing market and a football schedule collide hard enough.
None of this means don’t sell in the fall, or wait for spring, or any of the advice people repeat because they heard someone else say it first. Fall sellers are often more motivated than spring sellers, not less — job relocations, year-end timelines, people who need to be settled before the holidays. Combine that with buyers who are actually serious instead of just spring-browsing, and you get a market that trades calmer, not colder.
Closings don’t care what channel is on, either. Alex over at NextTitle has closed deals with a game muted in the background on somebody’s phone during signing — buyers checking the score between initials on the deed. Nobody’s ever asked to reschedule a closing for kickoff. Priorities hold up better than people give them credit for.
Marc Anthony’s got the whole thing figured out, more or less. Vivir mi vida — you don’t stop living because something’s playing on another channel. Voy a reír, voy a bailar. You laugh, you dance, you keep going, whatever the scoreboard says.
The market doesn’t stop for the game. It just puts on a jersey.
📊 Yesterday’s poll: PENDING — pull Wednesday’s real results + Rob’s take from Beehiiv before this sends. Do not publish with this line still here.
Today’s poll:
Cards or Cats this football season?
🏆 Want today’s Top Five? Every morning I pull the five best deals on the Louisville MLS — and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I’d offer. I can’t blast other agents’ listings to a list (rules are rules), but I can send them to you personally. Reply “FIVE” and they’re yours.
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: If you’re hosting an open house this fall, check the kickoff time before you set the hour — or just lean into it. Put the Red Zone Channel on in the living room and let the game be part of the draw. Nobody’s tried it around here yet, as far as I know. Somebody run that experiment and reply to tell me if it worked!