Louisville inventory +30% YoY, pendings -19%, prices flat. Yours too?

I pull our MLS numbers every week, and July was the first month where the two halves of this market stopped agreeing with each other. Posting the raw figures in case anyone else is watching this metro.

Jefferson County, single family, July 2026 vs July 2025:

Active listings: 1,777 to 2,305 (+29.7%)

Pending sales: 999 to 806 (-19.3%)

Average days on market: 23.0 to 26.2

Greater Louisville, same month: 1,612 closings (up 3.2%), 1,126 pendings (down 24.3%), 4,480 units of inventory, 3.5 months' supply, the most we've carried since around 2016. Median sale price $310,000, up 5.1%. Sellers averaged 98.4% of list.

Read those together and something is off. Supply up 30%, demand down 19%, and the market is still absorbing a house in three extra days at basically full price.

Two things I think are going on.

1) Pendings and closings are telling different stories. A July closing is a deal that got written in May. A pending got written last week. Almost every market update leads with closings because that's the number that gets published, but it's a photograph of the past. In June our pendings were up 5.8%. In July they were down 24.3%. That's a thirty-point swing in thirty days, and it hasn't reached the closing numbers yet. My own weekly count agrees: 347 sales the week of Aug 9-15 last year, 277 the same week this year. Down 20%.

2) The softening isn't spread evenly. This is the part I haven't seen anybody write about. Jefferson County showings last month, by price band:

Under $200K: down 24.5%

$200K to $350K: up 3%

$350K to $600K: up 15.4%

$600K and up: up 41.5%

That's backwards from what a cooling market is supposed to look like. The cheap houses are getting ignored and the expensive ones are getting mobbed.

Our affordability index is sitting at 110, the lowest reading on a chart that starts in 2007. My read: the entry-level buyer isn't negotiating, they're disqualified. They can't clear the payment at all. The $600K buyer has equity and doesn't much care what the rate is.

So "Louisville is softening" is true and useless. Prices haven't broken. Leverage has, and only in the bottom third of the market, which is exactly where most of the buy-and-hold inventory lives here.

What that's meant in practice: under $250K you're competing on payment, not price. A rate buydown moves that buyer. A $5,000 price cut does not. On the buy side, the ask getting accepted right now is terms, seller carry, credits, buydowns, not discount.

Year to date we've listed 17,317 homes and sold 10,020. Last year that gap was 5,487. Now it's 7,297. Call it 1,800 more houses piling up than a year ago, concentrated at the low end.

Here's what I'd actually like to know: is the softening showing up from the bottom up in your metro too, or is this a Louisville affordability problem?

If you've got access to your local numbers, drop three things in the comments and I'll keep a running tally right here in the thread: your metro, active listings YoY, and pending sales YoY. I'd expect this split in the expensive coastal markets. I'm curious whether the midwest and southeast cashflow markets are seeing the same shape, because if they are, it changes where the entry-level deals are for everybody.