Today’s track: Tyler Childers — Universal Sound
I used to have an Airbnb off Poplar Level Road, on Cheak Street. Right after you make the turn — before you hit the Kroger on Poplar Level — there’s a pothole. I hit that thing more times than I can count. In my car (Walter, I named my Tesla with FSD Walter after he passed. You know, re-in-car-nation. I turn on FSD and thank “pet” him when we make it somewhere. When we screw up “I’m like what are you even doing Walter!”) In my Dad’s Toyota suv. In my sister’s Subaru Forester.
Every time, it pissed me off. Especially on the drives when I was headed to the hospital to get hooked up and prodded, to get scanned, to get whatever done that week.
Then I got diagnosed. Then I went in for the real surgery.
And somewhere in there — boom — they paved Poplar Level. Not a week after I got diagnosed. No more pothole. No more dealing with an annoying pothole I had dealt with for seven years! Do you know this former pot hole?!?
There’s been a few of these oddities.
I was sitting in an Adirondack chair by the fire pit, on the phone with my sister Katie, when a branch came down out of the large maple tree in my yard. Twelve feet tall. She could hear it crash on her end of the phone. It landed straight up — stuck in the ground like someone stood it there on purpose. It stood for nine days! AI said it was like Winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning in the same day. For some reason it made me feel at ease. What are the odds it happens? The odds I’m their to be a witness to it? I took it as a sign.
Before my sister left, after the first “uh-oh, it’s cancer” gut punch, she ordered from Ichiban — the sushi spot on Breckenridge Lane — because it doesn’t use seed oils. The next morning I cracked open the one fortune cookie that was left.
Mine said….
Maybe it’s coincidence. I’m going to have my sister help me frame it when she comes back into town from Columbus, Ohio. Either way — there is more in me, more to do, more people to impact and empower. More family’s to put into homes with Hand in Hand.
Hit reply and tell me about a moment that felt like the universe was reinforcing you.
Two Listings For Every One Sale
Now let’s talk about what’s actually happening in this market — because the June numbers are the most interesting they’ve been in three years, and almost everybody is going to read them wrong.
Here’s the headline everyone will repeat: closed sales up 10.5%. Median price basically flat at $304,400.
Sounds fine. Sounds boring.
It’s not.
Closed sales are a rearview mirror. A home that closed in June went under contract in April. If you want to know where this market is going, you look at pending sales — and pending sales in June were 1,231.
Last June they were 1,430.
Down 13.9%.
Now look at the week of July 19–25. Last year: 368 solds. This year: 312. Down 15%.
The slowdown didn’t arrive. It’s already here. Most people are just reading last quarter’s number and calling it this quarter’s market.
In June, Greater Louisville put 2,473 new listings on the market. In that same month, 1,231 homes went under contract.
Last June that ratio was 1.54 to 1.
Year to date, new listings are up 17.1%. Closed sales are up 6.1%. Supply is growing at nearly three times the rate demand is absorbing it.
That is not a crash. Nothing in this data looks like 2008 — let me be clear about that. But it is a fundamental change in who holds leverage, and it’s happening quietly, month over month, while everyone argues about interest rates.
Inventory: 4,193 homes for sale. A year ago, 3,096. Up 35.4%.
Months supply: 3.3, up from 2.5.
And the absorption rate — the share of standing inventory that actually went under contract that month — was 46% last June. This June it was 29%.
Think about what that means if you’re the one holding the listing. This is where Winner Realty shines! Nobody gets your deals in front of more buyers! My newsletter 62,000 subscribers with average open rate of 36.07%. Banks have a comparable open rate! Think about that!!!!! We also send it out to offmarket.deals, blast out on socials, and we reach out to the top 25 buyers for that asset class in that zip code. We say “hey we have this great deal, we know you’re one of the best buyers in the market, we wanted to get our deal in front of you. Every.single. offmarket.deals deal gets this, so does every Winner Realty listing! We leave no stone unturned! This is what you need in this kind of market. Also, other tricks of the trade of course! We are here to serve! Would love to chat more!
This market isn’t softening evenly. It’s softening from the bottom up — which is the opposite of what most people assume.
Jefferson County showings, June 2026, by price band:
Under $200,000 — showings down 18.8%. $200,000 to $349,999 — up 8.9%. $350,000 to $599,999 — up 18.6%. $600,000 and above — up 24.6%.
The cheap houses are getting less attention. The expensive houses are getting more.
Why? Look at the affordability index: 114. That’s near the bottom of the entire range going back to 2007. In 2013 it was over 220.
The buyer who would have bought a $180,000 house in Shively or Okolona is the buyer who got hit hardest. Their payment didn’t move a little — it moved enough to price them out of a mortgage entirely. Meanwhile the $600,000 buyer has equity from the last house, or cash, or a payment that doesn’t decide their life.
So the bottom of this market has a demand problem.
And the top of it has a supply problem — $600K+ listings in Jefferson County are up 20.9% year over year.
Two completely different markets. Two completely different playbooks. Anyone handing you one piece of blanket advice about “the Louisville market” right now isn’t paying attention.
Now the stat that ties it all together.
Buyer interest — showings divided by listings — fell in every single price band in Jefferson County.
Under $200K: down 21.7%. $200–350K: down 17.5%. $350–600K: down 5.9%. $600K+: down 2.4%.
Every band. Down.
Overall buyer interest is 4.4 showings per listing, down 13.7% from a year ago.
More homes. Less attention per home. That’s the whole market in one sentence.
So what do you actually do with this?
If you’re selling: price it for day one. Days on market hit 47 in June, up 23.7%. But percent of list price received is still 98.4%.
Read those two numbers together, because they’re saying something specific. Sellers are still getting nearly their asking price — they’re just waiting three weeks longer to get it. Sellers have capitulated on time. They have not yet capitulated on price.
That gap is where every dollar of negotiation in this market lives.
And that 98.4% is survivorship bias. It only counts the homes that sold. It tells you nothing about the 4,193 sitting there right now, quietly aging.
If you’re buying: we ought to get you set up on daily drips and drips sorted by days on market and start at 45.
A seller at day 15 still believes their price. A seller at day 50 has watched weekends go by with no showings, and something has changed in their head that hasn’t changed on the MLS yet.
Sub-$200K in Jefferson County is the most interesting square on this entire board. Showings down 18.8%, listings essentially flat. Less competition than any point in five years — for the exact product that cash-flows. Everybody chasing the shiny stuff moved up-market. The rentals got left behind.
Watch Bullitt and Shelby. Bullitt County showings in the $350–600K band are up 54.5%. Shelby County $600K+ is up 36.3%. Meanwhile Oldham County — the traditional prestige play — is down 7.6% overall. Money is moving, and it isn’t moving where it used to.
And if you own in Grayson, Breckinridge, or Meade County: buyer interest there is 1.3, 1.3, and 1.7 showings per listing. You price aggressively or you sit. There is no third option.
One more thing, and this is the part I actually care about.
Go back to the top of this email. Median sales price: $304,400. Down 0.2%.
That number is going to lead every headline written about this market. It’s also the least useful number on the entire page — and right now it may be actively lying to you.
Here’s why.
The median is just the middle sale. It moves when the mix of what sells moves, not only when values move.
So look at what the mix is doing. Sub-$200K showings in Jefferson County: down 18.8%. $600K+ showings: up 24.6%. Fewer inexpensive homes are trading. More expensive ones are.
Which means the median gets pushed up by composition alone — even if every individual house in this city were worth slightly less than it was a year ago.
The entry-level buyer got knocked out by affordability. Their absence doesn’t show up as a price drop. It shows up as those houses simply not selling — and the median drifting quietly higher because the cheap end stopped voting.
A flat median in this environment isn’t evidence of a stable market. It’s what a softening market looks like before softening reaches price.
The indicators that actually move first are the ones nobody puts in a headline: pending sales, days on market, months supply, buyer interest per listing.
All four turned this quarter. All four turned the same direction.
Price is the last domino, not the first. It’s the slowest, laggiest, most-quoted number we have — and by the time it finally moves, whatever edge was sitting there is already gone.
Watch the leading indicators. Let everybody else read the headline.
Want My Read On Your Specific Situation?
Everything above is the market at 30,000 feet. Your situation isn’t at 30,000 feet — it’s one property, one ZIP code, one price band, one timeline.
So let’s talk about yours. Twenty minutes.
Not a listing presentation. Not a pitch. Twenty minutes where I pull your ZIP code, your price band, and your days-on-market picture, and I tell you what I actually see — whether that’s “list it Tuesday,” “you’ve got until spring,” or “you’re sitting on the exact product nobody is competing for right now, go buy three more.”
I do a handful of these every week. Some turn into business. Most don’t. I do them anyway, because this is the market where picking the wrong month costs you real money — and picking the right one makes you some.
If you’re within six months of buying, selling, or refinancing anything in this market, take the twenty minutes. Worst case, you leave knowing exactly where you stand.
Yesterday’s Poll Response:
What's the biggest bottleneck in your business right now?
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Schedule a time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind. https://robbergeron.youcanbook.me
The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-morning-bergeron/pl.u-pMyl2GlSW1N3qv
PS: Seriously, book the call. Twenty minutes, right here. I just handed you 1,100 words on where this market is going. The next step is what it means for your address, your price band, your timeline — and that part I can only do one conversation at a time.
PSS: Three unique groups of opportunities live right now:
Duplexes under $300,000
Single family properties under $100,000
Land offering seller financing
PSSS: The Party in the Woods Playlist. Eric Payne from Kentucky Private Lending and I are still vibing with it! He just discovered Gooey! Have you found some time to put it on shuffle and wiggle with it?
PSSSS: My friend and creative financing expert, Andrew Schlag, is putting together a room full of people like us in Nashville this August (14-16) and showing them everything he knows about owner financing and doing deals without a bank. I'll be up there speaking alongside him and other RE experts. Early bird's open right now if you want the details » https://request.truka.com/