Organizer

Blog

No Comments

Selling Your Home this Fall?

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: For Sellers,Holidays,Selling Tips

Ask around and you’ll hear the same advice: sell in spring, wait if you missed it. Around here, that advice costs people money.

Selling your home in the fall works differently than selling it in April, and in Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Cordova, and out in Arlington and Lakeland, differently can mean better. The buyers change, the calendar tightens, and the competition mostly goes home. We wrote about selling a Germantown home in the summer heat earlier this year; this is the autumn sequel, and the season has its own rulebook. This post covers who’s still buying after Labor Day, the dates that decide whether you close this year, how to price when the comps get thin, and what to do when the holidays arrive with your sign still in the yard.

The fall buyer is a different animal

Spring buyers browse. They have six months of runway, forty listings to tour, and a school calendar giving them until August. Fall buyers don’t have any of that, and it shows in how they behave.

Who’s left after Labor Day? Corporate relocations, for one. Companies move people on the company’s schedule, and a family relocating to the area in October needs a house in October, not in May. These suburbs collect a steady share of those buyers because relocating families shop the school districts first and the neighborhoods second. Then there are the buyers who lost out in spring, sometimes on three or four houses, and are still hungry. And the ones staring at a personal deadline: a lease ending in December, a baby coming in February, a job that starts January 5.

So expect fewer showings and better ones. A June listing might get fifteen showings and one offer. An October listing might get six showings and one offer, and the people walking through are pre-approved, motivated, and done sightseeing. Fewer footprints on your carpet, same sold sign.

The other half of the equation: most of your would-be competition believed the sell-in-spring advice. Fall inventory thins out, which means the buyer who needs a four-bedroom in a good school zone this month is choosing from a short list. Being on a short list is a fine place to be.

The dates that decide your year

Fall selling runs on a countdown, and it’s worth doing the arithmetic before you list rather than after.

A typical financed sale takes 30 to 45 days from contract to close, and before that you need time to go under contract at all. Give a well-priced listing a few weeks to attract its buyer and you get the rule we give clients: to close before December 31, be on the market by mid-October. List November 1 and you’re negotiating over Thanksgiving and hoping the appraiser isn’t on vacation. It happens, but the margin is gone.

The countdown steepens as it goes. Lenders, appraisers, inspectors, and title offices all run holiday-thin from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, and a file that would sail through in early October crawls in late December. Buyer traffic follows the same slope: solid in September and October, softer in November, and mostly quiet from mid-December on.

None of that is a reason to panic-list this weekend. It’s a reason to pick a lane. On the market by October 15, or plan a January launch and use the extra weeks to prepare. The awkward middle, listing in late November because you finally got around to it, is the one move the calendar punishes.

Pricing against a thinner comp set

Fall pricing has a trap in it. The comps your neighbor quotes at the mailbox are from May and June, when the yard looked perfect and three families were bidding on everything in the zip code. By October those numbers are a season old, and buyers’ agents know it even when sellers don’t.

That doesn’t mean fall prices collapse here; these suburbs hold value well precisely because supply stays tight. It means the evidence is thinner. Fewer recent sales means each comp carries more weight, and one overpriced neighbor who sat all summer says as much as one strong sale. A good agent will walk you through which September closings reflect the current market and which are leftovers from spring contracts, because a September closing is often a July deal wearing a fall date.

The first two weeks still decide everything. A fall listing that debuts too high doesn’t get a spring correction wave of fresh buyers to bail it out; the pool is smaller, everyone in it sees your listing the day it goes live, and they all watch it sit. We wrote up the pricing mistake that costs sellers in detail, and fall is when it bites hardest, because the calendar you just read about eats the recovery time.

Curb appeal when the leaves are falling

Fall curb appeal advice usually amounts to pumpkins on the porch. In neighborhoods like ours, the real work is overhead.

Germantown, east Collierville, and the older streets of Bartlett and Cordova are full of houses under forty-year-old oaks and maples, which is a big part of why buyers want them, and every one of those trees is about to put its leaves on your lawn weekly through November. A buyer pulling up to a leaf-buried yard and full gutters doesn’t think “autumn.” They think “deferred maintenance,” and they start looking for more of it inside. Raked lawn, clean gutters, clear roofline. Boring, and worth real money.

Two fall-specific moves earn their keep. First, get exterior photos taken early, while the trees still have color, even if you list a few weeks later; bare-branch photos in the listing tell everyone how long you’ve been sitting the moment December arrives. Second, walk your house at 5:30 PM after the time change. That’s when second showings happen, in the dark, so porch lights, path lights, and a bright entry do the job the sun did in June. Inside, turn on every lamp for every showing and let the house feel warm; a fall buyer standing in a bright, warm living room while it’s cold and dark outside is feeling exactly what you want them to feel: I could live here.

If you’re weighing bigger fixes, stick to the ones that return their cost; our list of home upgrades that help a house sell applies in any season. And consider having your HVAC serviced before you list. The furnace is about to get its first workout of the year during your showing window, and “heat didn’t seem to work upstairs” is a sentence you never want in an offer’s repair addendum. A glance at the common home inspection red flags now beats discovering one under contract in December, when contractor schedules and the closing countdown are both against you.

What fall looks like suburb by suburb

The season plays a little differently across the east side of the county.

In Germantown and Collierville, the school-zone premium doesn’t hibernate. Families already zoned locally mostly bought by August, but relocation buyers chase GMSD and Collierville Schools year-round, and they shop with urgency. If your house sits in a sought-after zone, fall is a legitimately strong window; you’re one of few options for a buyer who has to solve schools now. Our tour of Collierville’s best neighborhoods shows the kind of research these relocating families are doing before they ever land at the airport.

Bartlett and Cordova stay livelier later into the year. Value-focused buyers, first-timers, and move-up families priced out of the bigger-name suburbs keep touring well into November, because for them the math matters more than the season. If anything, fall’s thinner inventory helps a well-kept Bartlett listing stand out in a way it wouldn’t in a crowded April.

Arlington and Lakeland sellers have one extra assignment: know what the builders are doing. These are new-construction towns, and builders close their fiscal years with incentives, rate buydowns, closing-cost credits, sometimes real price cuts on standing inventory. A resale seller a mile from a spec home with a year-end deal attached needs to know that before setting a price, because your buyer will know it. Your edge is everything the spec house doesn’t have: the established yard, the finished blinds and gutters and fence, the no-waiting move-in. Sell that, and price with the builder’s incentive in view. If you’re not sure how your suburb stacks up this season, the Collierville vs Germantown vs Bartlett comparison is a good primer on what buyers are weighing.

When the holidays arrive and it hasn’t sold

Say it’s the week before Thanksgiving and you’re still on the market. You have three honest options.

Riding it out is stronger than it feels. The December buyer is the most serious buyer of the year; nobody tours a stranger’s house on December 28 for fun. Showings will be scarce, but each one is live ammunition. Keep the house warm, keep it easy to show, and be patient with the pace.

Regrouping is also legitimate. Some sellers take the listing down in late November and relaunch in early January, ahead of the spring flood, with fresh photos and, if the market said so, a fresh price. January buyers show up earlier than most sellers expect, and a relaunched listing meets them without the “what’s wrong with it” cloud of a 90-day-old one. If the first attempt taught you something, that lesson belongs in the relaunch; our post on what to do when your house didn’t sell walks through the diagnosis.

What we’d steer you away from is the quiet third option: leaving a stale, overpriced listing up through the holidays untouched, on the theory that it costs nothing. It costs the relaunch. By February, every agent in the area has watched it sit for 120 days, and that history follows the house.

The season rewards sellers who respect the calendar

Fall doesn’t punish sellers in these suburbs. It punishes sellers who drift into it, listing in late November at June’s price with July’s photos. The ones who count backward from December 31 and pick a lane do fine, and often better than fine, because most of their competition took the season off.

If you’re deciding whether to list now or wait for spring, talk to us. We’ll pull what’s genuinely sold near you in the last sixty days, tell you what your street’s fall market looks like, and give you a straight answer, even if that answer is “wait.” Our whole approach to selling your house starts with the timing conversation, because in a fall market, when you list is half the strategy.

No Comments

Selling an Inherited Home

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Baby Boomers,Rent vs. Buy,Senior Market

The call usually comes at a bad time, and the house is the last thing you’re thinking about. Then a few weeks pass and it becomes the first thing. A parent’s home in Germantown or Collierville, bought in the 1980s or 90s, paid off or close to it, sitting there with the thermostat still set the way they liked it.

If you’re selling an inherited house in Germantown TN, or in Collierville, you’re in a better position than most heirs in the country. These are neighborhoods where buyers are waiting, where the lot and the school zone carry real value even when the kitchen doesn’t, and where the tax rules tend to work in your favor. You still have to get the order of operations right, and that’s what this post is about.

We’re real estate agents, not attorneys or accountants, so treat the legal and tax parts as a map of what to ask, and take the questions to a Shelby County probate attorney and a CPA. And nothing here is urgent this week. The house isn’t going anywhere.

The first thirty days

Slow down and secure things. That’s the whole job for the first month.

Change the locks if more than a couple of people had keys. Keep the utilities on; a house with no power in a Memphis August grows mold fast, and a house with no heat in January bursts pipes. Forward the mail so you catch the bills and the statements you don’t know exist yet.

Call the homeowner’s insurance company. Most policies restrict coverage once a house has been empty for 30 to 60 days, and an empty house is exactly when you need the coverage. Ask what a vacancy endorsement costs. While you’re at it, find the deed, any mortgage statement, the latest property tax bill, and the will.

Then the hard part: don’t clear the house out yet. Until you know who has legal authority over the estate, you don’t know who gets to decide what happens to the contents. Families have fallen apart over a dining room table that one sibling hauled to Goodwill in week two.

Who can legally sell the house

In Tennessee, ownership of real estate generally passes to the heirs at the moment of death, either through the will or, without a will, through the state’s intestacy rules. That sounds like you can sell right away. In practice, a title company will almost always want to see court paperwork before it insures the sale, which means some form of probate in Shelby County Probate Court.

If there’s a will, it names an executor (Tennessee calls them the personal representative) and that person petitions the court to open the estate. If the will only needs to pass real estate and there’s nothing else to administer, Tennessee has a shorter route where the will is probated as a “muniment of title” without a full administration. Your attorney will know in five minutes whether the estate qualifies. Tennessee’s small-estate affidavit is a separate shortcut, and it generally covers personal property under a set dollar limit, not the house.

Without a will, the court appoints an administrator and the house goes to the heirs the statute names, which for a widowed parent usually means the children in equal shares. That’s where sibling ownership begins, and we’ll get to it.

If the house was held in a living trust, the trustee can typically sell without probate at all, which is why a lot of Germantown families set one up. And as of this writing, Tennessee doesn’t offer a transfer-on-death deed for real estate, so if a well-meaning friend says “just file the TOD form,” that’s another state’s advice.

Expect the court process to take a few months before you can close, partly because Tennessee gives creditors a window to file claims against the estate. You can list and market the house during that time.

The tax break most heirs don’t know about

When you inherit a house, the IRS resets its cost basis to the fair market value on the date of death. Accountants call it the stepped-up basis. Say your parents bought a house on a cul-de-sac off Poplar Pike in 1988 for $180,000, and it’s worth $520,000 the month they passed. If you sell it soon after for $520,000, your taxable gain is roughly zero. The $340,000 of appreciation they watched happen over four decades drops out of the tax math entirely. Those figures are illustrative, but the mechanism is real, and it’s why heirs who sell within the first year or so rarely owe capital gains tax on a parent’s home. Inherited property also counts as a long-term holding no matter how quickly you sell.

The basis only steps up once, and it’s tied to that date-of-death value. Which brings us to the single most useful thing in this post: get a date-of-death appraisal from a licensed appraiser, even if you plan to keep the house for a while. It’s a few hundred dollars. It documents your basis, it settles arguments between siblings about what the house is worth, and it’s the number every professional in this process will ask you for. We’d tell every heir to order one in the first month, before anyone has an opinion about price.

On the estate side, Tennessee repealed its inheritance tax for deaths after 2015, and there’s no state estate tax either. The federal estate tax only reaches estates worth many millions of dollars, so for most Germantown and Collierville families the house passes without an estate tax bill. Hold it for years and the gain above that stepped-up number becomes taxable when you sell, unless you move in and make it your own primary residence long enough to qualify for the homeowner exclusion. A CPA can run your specific situation.

If there’s still a mortgage

An unpaid mortgage doesn’t mean the house has to be sold immediately. Under federal law, a lender generally can’t call a loan due just because the borrower died and the home transferred to a relative. You can keep paying it while the estate is settled, and the servicer has to work with you as a “successor in interest,” which lets you get statements and talk to them even if you’re not on the loan.

Reverse mortgages are the exception. When the last borrower dies, the loan comes due, and heirs typically get a limited window, often around six months with extensions available, to sell the house, refinance it, or pay the balance. If a parent had a reverse mortgage, call the servicer in the first two weeks and ask for the payoff and the deadline in writing.

Property taxes keep coming too. Germantown and Collierville homeowners get two bills, one from Shelby County and one from the city, and any senior tax freeze or tax relief your parent qualified for ends with them. The bill on a house that’s been frozen for a decade can jump when it resets to the current rate and assessment. If you want to see how those two bills work, we broke it down in our guide to property taxes in Germantown and Shelby County.

When you inherited it with your siblings

Three names on the deed, three opinions about the house. This is the situation that stalls more inherited sales than probate ever does.

The cleanest resolution is a buyout. One sibling wants to keep the house, the appraisal sets the number, and they pay the others their share, usually by getting a mortgage on the property in their own name. The date-of-death appraisal is what makes this work without a fight, because it’s an outside number nobody picked.

If nobody wants it, you sell and split the net proceeds. A house held jointly by heirs sells like any other house; the difference is that every co-owner signs the listing agreement and the closing documents, so decide up front who’s the point of contact for the agent and how decisions get made. A group text that needs three yeses for every showing feedback email will wear everyone out by week four.

The ugly path is a partition action, where one co-owner asks the court to force a sale because the others won’t agree. It works, and it turns the family into litigants for a year. In our experience, most families who end up there could have avoided it with one appraisal and one honest conversation in the first month.

Sell it as-is or fix it first

Somebody will tell you the house needs a full renovation before it can sell. In Germantown and Collierville, that’s usually wrong.

These suburbs have a deep pool of buyers who want in for the schools and the lot, and a fair number of them are happy to buy a well-built 1980s house with an original kitchen if the price reflects it. What they won’t tolerate is deferred maintenance they can’t see the bottom of: a roof at the end of its life, an HVAC system from the Clinton administration, foundation movement in the east-metro clay, a wet crawlspace. Fix or price for the things an inspector will flag; we covered the ones that scare buyers off in our post on home inspection red flags.

What’s worth doing is the cheap stuff. Clear the house completely, deep clean, paint the wood-paneled den, pull the carpet if there’s hardwood under it, and let the light in. A cosmetic refresh in one of these neighborhoods often returns more than it costs. A gut remodel almost never does when you’re selling right after, because you’re guessing at a stranger’s taste. Our list of home upgrades that help sell your house is the right scope for an inherited home.

On the contents: an estate sale company will handle a full house for a percentage of the proceeds and leave you with a clean-out list. Just settle who owns what before the tags go on.

Renting it out instead

Some heirs look at a paid-off house in a top school district and think landlord. It’s a legitimate option in these suburbs, and we wrote the honest version of the math in buying a rental property in Germantown or Collierville. The short version: strong tenants, thin cash flow, real appreciation.

Inheritance adds a couple of cautions. Tennessee doesn’t give owner-occupants a property tax discount, so the bills don’t shrink when it becomes a rental, and they’ll have already reset from any senior freeze. And renting complicates a later sale between siblings, because now there’s a lease and a tenant with rights in the middle of a family decision. If you’re on the fence, our guide to whether to rent your house or sell it applies here, with the added wrinkle that you’re not the one who chose the house.

Pricing a house nobody has bought in forty years

Inherited homes get mispriced in both directions. Out-of-town heirs anchor on the number their parents mentioned at Thanksgiving, usually a Zestimate from three years ago. Local heirs anchor on what the renovated house down the street sold for, and forget theirs has the original bathrooms.

The right comps for a dated house are other dated houses in the same neighborhood. In Germantown and Collierville, the same floor plan in Forest Hill or Halle Plantation can sell for very different prices depending on whether the kitchen has been touched, and a good agent will show you both sets of comps side by side instead of averaging them. Overpricing an as-is house costs more here than elsewhere, because the buyers who want a project want a deal, and the buyers who want move-in-ready won’t come look. We wrote about the pricing mistake that costs sellers, and inherited homes are where we see it most.

Closing costs come out of the proceeds like any other sale: commission, title fees, and a prorated share of those two property tax bills. Our breakdown of what sellers pay in closing costs in the Memphis area is worth a read before you tell your siblings what the check will be.

Slow for a month, then decisive

Almost every inherited-home sale that goes badly went badly because someone moved fast in the first month and slow after that. Somebody cleared the house before the will was read, or listed it before probate opened, or priced it off a memory, and then the family spent a year untangling it.

Flip that. Spend the first month securing the house, ordering the appraisal, and getting a probate attorney to tell you who can sign. Then, once the authority and the number are settled, move with purpose: decide sell, keep, or rent, and do it.

If you’ve inherited a house in Germantown or Collierville and don’t know where to start, talk to us. We’ll walk through the house with you, pull the right comps for its condition, and tell you honestly what it would bring as-is versus with a light refresh. There’s no charge for the conversation.

No Comments

Buying a Rental Property in Germantown or Collierville

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Baby Boomers,Equity,Rent vs. Buy

Somewhere between “our savings account earns nothing” and “I don’t want to gamble on stocks,” a lot of Memphis-area families land on the same idea: buy a second house and rent it out. It’s a good instinct. Real estate is the one investment you can drive past, and the suburbs east of Memphis are full of people who did exactly this ten years ago and are quietly glad they did.

But buying a rental property in Germantown or Collierville is a different game than buying one in Midtown or Frayser, and most of the investing advice you’ll find online is written for neither. The national gurus preach cash flow above all, which points you toward cheap houses in rough pockets. The suburbs play a different hand. Here’s what the rental math looks like in the 38138 and 38017, what it costs to be a landlord that nobody mentions up front, and the two very different ways families around here get into their first rental.

Why tenants line up for these suburbs

Rental demand in Germantown and Collierville runs on one engine: the schools. Germantown Municipal School District and Collierville Schools are the reason families fight to live inside these boundaries, and not every family that wants in can buy right now. Some are relocating for work and renting for a year while they learn the area. Some sold a house, haven’t found the next one, and refuse to move their kids twice. Some are in that in-between season, after a divorce or before a transfer, where renting is the sane choice even though they could qualify for a mortgage tomorrow.

That’s your tenant pool, and it’s about the best one a landlord can ask for. These are renters with strong incomes, long time horizons by rental standards, and every incentive to keep the house nice, because they’re often hoping to buy in the same school zone later. Houses in these suburbs rarely sit empty long, and when a good one hits the rental market during summer moving season, it can draw applications in days.

The flip side: this tenant pool rents houses, not units. They want the yard, the garage, the good kitchen, the school assignment. A dated house shows its age fast against the competition, so the “buy the ugly one and never touch it” strategy that works in cheaper markets doesn’t fly here.

The honest math

Now the part the seminar guys skip. Landlords have a rule of thumb called the 1% rule: a rental should bring in about 1% of its purchase price in monthly rent. Almost nothing in Germantown or Collierville hits that number, and it hasn’t for years.

Run an illustrative example. Suppose you buy a solid three-bedroom for $450,000 and it rents for $2,800 a month. That’s about 0.6%. After the mortgage on an investment loan, property taxes, insurance, and a repair reserve, your monthly cash flow is thin, and some months it’s negative. A spreadsheet built purely on cash flow will tell you to buy three cheap houses in Memphis proper instead.

So why does anyone buy rentals here? Because cash flow is only one of the ways a rental pays you. The suburbs’ pitch is different: tenants who pay on time and renew, vacancy measured in days instead of months, houses that hold value through downturns better than almost anywhere in the region, and appreciation on a $450,000 asset instead of a $150,000 one. Meanwhile the tenant is paying down your loan every month regardless of what the cash flow line says. It’s a wealth-building play more than an income play. If you need the rent check to cover your own bills, these suburbs are the wrong market. If you’re parking money for fifteen years, they’re one of the best markets in the Mid-South.

The costs nobody puts in the brochure

Whatever the listing math says, the real numbers are worse, and it’s better to hear that now.

Property taxes don’t shrink when you rent the place out. Tennessee doesn’t give owner-occupants a discounted assessment, so a rental in Germantown pays the same two tax bills, county and city, that a homeowner pays. We broke the whole system down in our guide to property taxes in Germantown and Shelby County, and you should run those numbers on any house before you offer, because in these suburbs the tax line is big enough to swing a deal.

Insurance changes too. You’ll need a landlord policy rather than a standard homeowner policy, and it usually costs more for less-familiar coverage. Then there’s the reserve fund. HVAC systems in a Memphis August do not care that you just closed. A rule many local landlords use: set aside 10% or so of every rent check for repairs and another chunk for the big-ticket items on a countdown, roof, water heater, HVAC.

And decide early who’s answering the 9 PM texts. Property managers around here typically charge 8-12% of collected rent plus a leasing fee, and plenty of first-time landlords consider it the best money they spend. Self-managing one house in the suburb you live in is doable. Just price your own weekends honestly.

Two doors into your first rental

Families around here become landlords by two routes, and they feel completely different.

The first is buying a rental outright. Expect the lender to treat you differently than they did on your home: investment property loans generally want 15-25% down and carry a higher rate than an owner-occupied mortgage. Some buyers cover that down payment with savings; others tap the equity in their current home to fund it, which is exactly the kind of move we walked through in how home equity can work for you. Either way, get pre-approved before you shop, because the pre-approval conversation is where you learn what the investment-loan version of your budget really is.

The second door is the one more Germantown and Collierville families walk through: move up, and keep the house you already own. You’re buying your next primary residence at normal owner-occupied rates, and your current house, the one you know every quirk of, becomes the rental. There’s no investment loan, no learning a new property, and your old 3% mortgage rate keeps working for you. We covered the decision in depth in should you rent your house or sell it, but one wrinkle deserves repeating: the tax exclusion on the sale of a primary home has a clock on it once you move out. If there’s a chance you’ll want to sell the old house within a few years, sit down with a tax professional before you convert it.

Landlording in Tennessee is the easy part

Some good news for the nervous. Tennessee is, by most measures, a landlord-friendly state, and it takes no income tax out of your rent at the state level. In Shelby County, the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act sets the ground rules for leases, deposits, and repairs, and they’re not hard to follow, especially with the kind of tenants these suburbs attract.

Two local checks before you buy, though. If the house is in an HOA, read the covenants for rental restrictions, because some neighborhoods cap the number of rentals or require board approval, and that’s a fact you want before closing, not after. And confirm what the city requires of rental properties, since requirements change and it’s a five-minute phone call.

Picking the house and the suburb

The two suburbs rent a little differently. Germantown’s rental market skews toward established neighborhoods and families targeting specific school zones; inventory is tight and older houses with good bones do well if they’ve been updated. Collierville adds newer construction to the mix, and areas like Schilling Farms put renters close to the employers along the Highway 385 corridor. If you’re comparing pockets, our walk through the best neighborhoods in Collierville applies to landlords as much as buyers, and the current inventory in both towns is here: homes in Germantown and homes in Collierville.

And if the math in this post made you wince, don’t rule out the middle path. Bartlett buys you into a strong school system at a lower entry price, which moves the rent-to-price ratio meaningfully in your favor while keeping the stable-suburb character that makes this whole strategy work.

Buy the boring house

After all the analysis, our honest advice is unglamorous: the best first rental in these suburbs is the plain three-bedroom, two-bath house in a good school zone that needs nothing. Not the fixer with upside. Not the unusual property that photographs beautifully. The boring house rents fast, breaks rarely, and attracts the tenant who stays three years, and boring is exactly what you want from something you own for fifteen.

If you’re weighing a rental purchase, or trying to decide whether the house you’re about to move out of should become one, talk to us. We’ll run the real numbers with you, both bills of the tax math included, and tell you plainly whether the deal works.

No Comments

The Best Neighborhoods in Collierville, TN

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Affordability,Demographics,First Time Home Buyers

Ask around Memphis about where to raise a family and Collierville comes up fast, usually in the same breath as its school system and that postcard town square. What the reputation doesn’t tell you is that “moving to Collierville” can mean eight different things. A restored cottage three blocks from the square, a brick colonial on a half-acre in Halle Plantation, and a brand-new build out east near the Fayette County line are all Collierville addresses, and they’re very different ways to live.

This guide walks through the neighborhoods buyers ask us about most, who each one tends to fit, and the practical stuff (taxes, schools, commutes) that should shape the shortlist. If you’re still deciding between suburbs, start with our Collierville vs. Germantown vs. Bartlett comparison and come back here once Collierville is winning.

Why buyers zero in on Collierville

Three things do most of the pulling. The first is Collierville Schools, the municipal district the town launched in 2014, which consistently ranks among the strongest in the Memphis area and feeds into a single, enormous Collierville High campus that opened in 2018. The second is the town square, a genuinely historic center with local restaurants, shops, and a year-round events calendar, which most suburbs this size simply don’t have. The third is the overall polish: parks, the W.C. Johnson trail system, Carriage Crossing for retail, and a small-town feel the town government protects fiercely through zoning.

The trade-off is that none of this is a secret. Collierville homes, especially in the school-zone sweet spots, draw multiple offers in normal markets. If that’s the arena you’re entering, read our guide to winning against multiple offers without overpaying before you fall in love with a house.

Historic Collierville and the square

The blocks around the town square are the Collierville you see on postcards: older cottages and bungalows, mature trees, sidewalks that lead somewhere. You can walk to dinner, to the farmers market, to concerts on the square. Inventory here is scarce and quirky. Houses range from lovingly restored to needs-everything, and lot-by-lot variation is huge, so a good inspection matters more here than anywhere else in town.

This area fits buyers who’d trade square footage for character and walkability, and it’s one of the few parts of Collierville where empty nesters and young couples compete for the same houses. When something clean hits the market near the square, it does not sit.

Schilling Farms

Schilling Farms is the master-planned counterpoint to the historic district: a large, newer community off Winchester with a mix of single-family homes, townhomes, apartments, offices, and its own schools nearby. The draw is convenience. You’re on the west side of town, which shaves real minutes off a Memphis commute, and daily errands stay inside the neighborhood’s orbit.

Housing stock runs from townhomes to sizable family homes, which makes Schilling Farms a common first Collierville address: buyers land here, learn the town, and either stay put or trade up within it. If you want newer construction without going to the far east side, this is usually where the search starts.

Halle Plantation

Halle Plantation is classic executive-suburb Collierville: brick homes, larger lots, established landscaping, and a golf-course community feel along the Halle Park area. It’s been one of the town’s flagship addresses since the 1990s, and it shows in both the upkeep and the prices.

The buyer who fits here usually wants space, a formal dining room they’ll use twice a year, and a street where the trees have had thirty years to grow. Homes are large enough that this is also where multi-generational setups and work-from-home couples with dueling offices tend to look.

Almadale Farms and Bailey Station

These two sit in the middle of the modern Collierville map, and they’re where a huge share of the town’s families actually live. Almadale Farms offers established 1990s-and-2000s homes with the neighborhood pool-and-playground infrastructure families want. Bailey Station, further east, skews newer, and its name now carries extra weight because of the surrounding school cluster and easy access to the newer retail corridors.

No square charm out here, no Halle grandeur. This is the practical version of Collierville: good streets, good schools, a manageable yard, and neighbors on the same life schedule. For most relocating families, the honest answer is that the search ends in one of these.

Forest Creek and Estanaula Trails

North and east of the core, neighborhoods like Forest Creek and Estanaula Trails trade a little polish for a little more house per dollar and quieter streets. Estanaula Trails in particular has been a target for buyers priced out of the central neighborhoods who refuse to give up the Collierville school zone. These areas are worth a hard look if your budget is getting stretched: the schools don’t change with the extra ten minutes of driving.

New construction on the east side

Collierville’s growth edge is east, toward the Fayette County line, where new developments keep adding options. New build gets you the floor plan, the warranty, and the kitchen you don’t have to renovate; it also gets you construction traffic, young trees, and a longer wait for the neighborhood to feel finished. If you go this route, bring your own representation. Our post on why having your own agent matters when buying new construction explains what the builder’s on-site agent won’t tell you.

One caution worth repeating from every new-build search we’ve run: model homes are marketing. Get the lot, the elevation, and every upgrade in writing before you compare prices against the resale market.

The money questions

Two practical notes before you shortlist anything. First, taxes: like Germantown, Collierville layers its own city property tax on top of the Shelby County bill, so your real tax cost is two bills, not one. The mechanics (assessment ratios, how to estimate, appeals, senior relief) work the same way we broke down in our Germantown and Shelby County property tax explainer, and it’s worth running those numbers on any house you’re serious about.

Second, competition: the strong neighborhoods here reward buyers who show up ready. That means walking in with pre-approval already done. In a multiple-offer situation on a Bailey Station four-bedroom, the pre-approved buyer is the one still standing.

If you’re moving from out of the area entirely, our newcomer’s guide to relocating to Memphis covers the region-wide picture, and the Bartlett buyer’s guide is the read if Collierville’s price tags send you looking for value elsewhere.

Pick the street, not just the zip code

Every neighborhood above shares the schools, the town services, and the Collierville address. What differs is the daily texture: walking to the square versus waving from the driveway, mature oaks versus builder saplings, character versus warranty. Buyers who pick the town and then stop deciding often end up in a fine house in the wrong-for-them neighborhood.

Browse what’s on the market right now on our Collierville homes page, and when you’re ready to talk streets instead of zip codes, reach out. We’ve walked buyers into most of these neighborhoods and we’ll tell you honestly which ones fit your list and which ones just photograph well.

No Comments

What Memphis-Area Buyers Should Know About Homeowners Insurance

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Affordability,Buying Tips,For Buyers,news

If you’re shopping for a home, you’ve probably been watching mortgage rates and prices like a hawk. The number almost nobody watches until the week before closing is homeowners insurance, and in the Memphis area it deserves a spot in your budget math from day one.

Insurance has always been part of owning a home. What’s changed over the past few years is the size of the line item. Premiums climbed steeply nationwide, and that stings when affordability already feels stretched. The newest data has a bit of genuinely good news in it, though: the increases are finally slowing down. And for buyers around Memphis specifically, the picture is better than the national headlines suggest.

Yes, premiums really did go up

You’ve probably heard it from a neighbor, or lived it on your own renewal notice. It’s not anecdotal. Pew Research Center found that 71% of U.S. homeowners say their insurance costs rose over the past few years.

Insurers spent those years absorbing expensive disasters and higher rebuilding costs, and they passed the bill along. For a buyer, the practical takeaway is to treat the premium as a real number to shop, not a rounding error. Your first year’s premium typically gets paid at closing (it’s one of the line items in our Memphis-area closing costs breakdown), and after that it usually rides along in your monthly escrow payment, right next to property taxes.

The increases are losing steam

Premiums are still rising. The pace is what’s changing. According to Rate Insurance’s latest annual report, 2025 brought the first slowdown in annual premium increases since 2019:

a graph of insurance coverage

That’s not the same as premiums getting cheaper, and it would be a stretch to promise relief on your renewal. But after several years of double-digit jumps in some markets, “rising slower” is a real change in direction, and it takes some pressure off buyers trying to pin down a monthly payment.

Tennessee buyers catch a break on price

Insurance is priced by claims, and claims are local, so what you’d pay in Memphis has little to do with what a buyer pays in Miami or Denver. This is where the news gets better for us.

Forbes puts the average Tennessee premium at $2,431 a year for a home with $350,000 of dwelling coverage, against a national average of $2,720. Nearly $300 a year cheaper than the typical American homeowner pays, and far below the coastal and hail-belt states that drive the scary headlines.

a map of the united states

Your own quote will land above or below that average depending on the house itself: its age, its roof, its distance from a fire station, your claims history, even your credit. Two homes on the same Germantown street can quote hundreds of dollars apart.

What drives premiums in the Memphis area

Around here, the weather story is wind. The MidSouth’s severe spring storms, straight-line winds, and occasional hail do most of the damage that turns into claims, and insurers price for it.

Two things follow from that. First, ask every insurer you quote how they handle wind and hail. Many policies in our area carry a separate wind-and-hail deductible, often set as a percentage of your dwelling coverage rather than a flat number, and the difference between 1% and 2% on a $400,000 policy is $4,000 out of pocket on a storm claim. Buyers compare premiums all day and never look at the deductible structure, then discover it the week a tree limb goes through the shingles.

Second, the roof matters enormously to your quote. An older roof can raise the premium, shrink the coverage to depreciated value, or in some cases make a policy hard to get at all, while a recent roof can earn a meaningful discount. It’s one more reason to pay attention when your home inspection flags roof wear: that finding follows you into your insurance bill every year, long after the negotiating table.

One more gap worth knowing about: standard homeowners policies don’t cover flooding, and parts of Shelby County sit near creeks and floodplains where lenders require a separate flood policy. If a house you love is anywhere near water, check its flood zone before you write the offer, because that second policy changes the monthly math.

Get a quote before you make an offer

The smartest insurance move a buyer can make costs nothing: get a real quote on the actual house while you’re still deciding, not after your offer is accepted.

An early quote does two jobs. It makes your budget honest, since your lender will count insurance in your monthly payment when finalizing what you can borrow comfortably. And it can surface a problem while you can still do something about it, like a roof that quotes badly or a prior claims history on the property. A ten-minute phone call beats a surprise at closing every time.

If you’re a first-time buyer, build the habit now: price the insurance the same day you price the mortgage.

How to keep the premium down

When you’re ready to buy coverage, a little effort goes a long way. Get quotes from at least three companies, because this market genuinely rewards shopping and the spread between carriers can be surprising. Ask about bundling home and auto, which is often the single biggest discount available. Then ask what other discounts exist, since nobody volunteers them: new roof, impact-resistant shingles, storm windows, monitored alarm, even paying annually instead of monthly.

Your credit score feeds most insurers’ pricing in Tennessee too, so the same credit cleanup that earns you a better mortgage rate quietly earns you a better premium.

And an independent local agent can quote several carriers at once and tell you which ones have been treating MidSouth storm claims fairly. That last part never shows up in an online quote, and it’s worth as much as the price.

Price the whole payment, not just the loan

Homeowners insurance has become a bigger piece of the homebuying conversation, but for Memphis-area buyers it doesn’t have to be a scary one. Tennessee premiums run below the national average, the increases are slowing, and almost everything else is within your control: quote early, mind the wind deductible and the roof, shop three carriers, and fold the real number into your budget before you fall in love with a house.

If you want help thinking through the full monthly cost of a home you’re considering, taxes, insurance, and all, reach out. We run that math with buyers every week, and we’re happy to point you to local agents our clients have had good experiences with.

No Comments

Property Taxes in Germantown and Shelby County, Explained

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: First Time Home Buyers,First-Time Buyers,Home Prices

If you own a home in Germantown, or you’re shopping for one, property taxes are probably the least understood number in your monthly payment. Buyers fixate on the mortgage rate, then get to the closing table and discover the escrow line. Owners get a reappraisal notice and can’t tell whether the bill is about to jump. And it’s two separate bills, which surprises nearly everyone we work with.

So let’s take the mystery out of it. By the end of this you should be able to read your own tax bill, and probably your neighbor’s.

How Tennessee figures a property tax bill

Tennessee has no state property tax and no state income tax on wages. Property taxes here are local: your county charges one rate, and if you live inside a city, that city charges its own on top.

The math runs on two numbers. First, the county assessor appraises your home’s market value. Then Tennessee applies its assessment ratio: residential property is taxed on 25% of that appraised value. A $600,000 home has an assessed value of $150,000, and every tax rate you’ll see is charged per $100 of that assessed number.

That 25% ratio is why Tennessee rates look scary out of context. A rate of $2.70 per $100 sounds enormous until you remember it applies to a quarter of your home’s value, not the whole thing.

The two bills every Germantown homeowner gets

Living in Germantown means two taxing authorities, and they bill separately.

Shelby County’s 2026 tax rate is $2.702382 per $100 of assessed value, and it applies to every property owner in the county, city or not. County bills go out in the fall and can be paid without penalty through the last day of February.

Germantown’s city rate is $1.79 per $100 of assessed value, set by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen with the FY26 budget. The city mails its own statements each November, due at the start of December, with the same end-of-February backstop before penalties start. Of that $1.79, the biggest single slice, 77 cents, funds public safety: police, fire, and EMS.

If your mortgage has an escrow account, your lender collects a twelfth of both bills each month and pays them for you, which is why most owners never write these checks directly. It’s still worth knowing the numbers, because escrow follows the bills, and when the bills move, your monthly payment moves with them.

What the bill looks like on a real Germantown home

Take that $600,000 Germantown home. Its assessed value is $150,000.

The county’s share works out to about $4,054 a year at the current rate. The city’s share is $2,685. Together that’s roughly $6,739 a year, or about $560 a month riding along in your escrow payment. For as long as you own the house.

Scale it to your own place from there: a $450,000 home lands near $5,050 a year combined, and an $800,000 home near $8,990. If you want to check the county’s math yourself, the Shelby County Trustee’s tax calculator uses the same formula.

How Germantown compares around the county

Germantown’s combined rate is lower than Memphis’s, which catches a lot of people off guard. Memphis adopted a 2025 city rate of about $2.58, so a Memphis homeowner pays roughly $5.28 per $100 assessed once the county is included, against Germantown’s roughly $4.49. On that same $600,000 of appraised value, the Memphis bill runs about $7,925 a year, almost $1,200 more than Germantown.

The catch, and it’s a real one, is that Germantown homes cost more per square foot, so the dollar totals often even out or flip. Choosing a suburb is really choosing a mix of home price, tax rate, and services. Each of the suburbs sets its own municipal rate and they all differ, which we broke down alongside schools and housing stock in our Collierville vs. Germantown vs. Bartlett comparison. And homeowners in unincorporated Shelby County pay only the county rate, the cheapest tax situation in the area, traded against city services.

Why everything changed in 2025

Shelby County reappraises every property on a four-year cycle, and 2025 was the year. The assessor reset values to the market as of January 1, 2025, and after several hot years, most East Shelby homeowners saw big jumps on paper. The next reappraisal comes in 2029.

Here’s the part of the system that’s genuinely well designed: a reappraisal is not allowed to be a stealth tax increase. State law requires each government to calculate a certified tax rate, the rate that would bring in the same total revenue from the new, higher values. That’s why the county’s rate fell from $3.39 to roughly $2.70 after reappraisal. Your value went up, the rate came down, and the two were supposed to wash for the average property.

Two things can still raise your actual bill. If your home’s value rose more than the county average, you absorb more of the load even at the certified rate. And a government can vote to go above its certified rate through a public process, which Germantown did, adding about 29 cents to fund the FY26 budget. That combination, above-average appreciation plus a rate increase, is why plenty of Germantown owners opened 2025 bills that were noticeably higher even though “rates went down” was technically true.

If you think your appraisal is wrong

You can’t appeal your tax rate, but you can appeal your appraised value, and the process starts free. The Shelby County Assessor offers an informal review where you submit evidence, and beyond that you can take your case to the County Board of Equalization, which meets starting in the spring.

Evidence beats frustration. Recent sales of genuinely comparable homes near you, a documented condition issue the mass appraisal couldn’t see, or an appraisal from your own refinance can all move the number. Between reappraisal years your value mostly sits still, so the months after a reappraisal notice are the window that matters most. If you’re weighing whether your number is out of line, we’re glad to pull the comparable sales; we watch Germantown’s market closely enough to know which sales the assessor’s model probably leaned on.

The tax breaks worth checking

Tennessee runs a property tax relief program for homeowners 65 and older, disabled homeowners, and disabled veterans, which reimburses part of the bill for those who income-qualify. Separately, Shelby County and Germantown participate in the tax freeze program, which locks the tax amount for qualifying homeowners 65 and up, so future rate and value increases can’t raise it. Income limits adjust each year, so check the current thresholds with the Shelby County Trustee rather than assuming you don’t qualify. If you have a parent in a long-owned Germantown home, this is worth a phone call; the freeze in particular is underused.

At tax-filing time, property taxes also feed the federal deduction picture for itemizers, which we covered in the tax benefits of owning a home in Memphis.

What this means when you’re buying or selling

For buyers, the practical move is to run the tax math on the specific home before you fall in love, because it changes what you can afford. Two houses at the same price in Germantown and unincorporated Shelby can differ by thousands a year in carrying cost. Your lender will fold the real number into your pre-approval, and if you’re comparing areas, we can run side-by-side tax scenarios for any home on your list, including current Germantown listings.

For sellers, taxes show up as a proration at closing: you cover the portion of the year you owned the home, the buyer takes the rest, and the settlement statement does the splitting. It’s one of the line items we walked through in what buyers and sellers pay in closing costs around Memphis.

Two bills, one number to know

If you remember one thing, make it your combined rate: about $4.49 per $100 of assessed value in Germantown right now, which pencils out to roughly 1.1% of your home’s market value per year. Know that number and you can sanity-check an escrow estimate or a reappraisal notice in about thirty seconds.

And if a bill or a notice doesn’t pass the smell test, reach out. We’ll pull the records and the comps and tell you whether it’s worth a fight or just the new normal.

No Comments

Should You Give Up Your Low Mortgage Rate To Move?

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Affordability,Economy,Interest Rates,Mortgage Rates

If you locked in a mortgage under 4% a few years back, congratulations, you’re holding one of the best financial deals of your life. And if you’ve outgrown that house, you already know the problem: the deal and the house come as a package. Giving up a low mortgage rate to move feels like burning money, so plenty of Memphis-area homeowners are still sitting in homes that stopped fitting years ago.

The honest answer to whether you should give it up is that it’s math plus life, and most people only run half of that equation. The rate math is real, but it’s smaller than the headline version in your head, and it shrinks further once your equity enters the picture. Meanwhile the cost of staying in the wrong house never shows up on a statement, which is exactly why it gets ignored.

This post walks through both halves: what trading your rate really costs in today’s market, what your equity does to that number, the workarounds that soften the jump, and the situations where keeping the rate is genuinely the right call.

The headline math overstates your real cost

Start with the scary version, because it’s the one keeping people frozen. Swap a 3% rate for one in the mid-6s on the same size loan and your payment on a $300,000 balance climbs by roughly $600 a month. Nobody shrugs that off. That number is why the lock-in effect froze the national market for three years.

But that comparison assumes you’d be borrowing the same amount again, and almost nobody who bought before 2022 is in that position. You’ve spent years paying the balance down while Memphis-area values climbed. The loan you’d need for your next house isn’t your old loan at a new rate. It’s a smaller-than-you-think loan shrunk by every dollar of equity you roll forward.

Run a realistic local example. Say you bought in Bartlett or Cordova for $280,000 in 2020, owe about $190,000 at 3%, and the home would sell around $360,000 today. After selling costs you’re walking with roughly $145,000 in equity. Put that toward a $450,000 house in Collierville and you’re financing about $305,000. Yes, the rate on that loan is higher. But you’re moving up $90,000 in house while your loan grows by $115,000, not by the full price of the new home. The payment jump is real money, often in the $700 to $900 range in a move like that one, but it buys a genuinely different house, not the same house at a worse price.

That’s the calculation worth doing with real numbers instead of dread. A home valuation tells you the equity half, and your current statement tells you the balance half. Most homeowners have never actually put the two side by side.

What staying put costs you

The other half of the equation has no monthly statement, so it hides.

If the house stopped fitting, you’re paying for that every day in some currency other than dollars. The commute that got longer when the job moved. The bedroom count that made sense before the second kid, or the twins, or the parent who moved in. The stairs that get harder every year. The four-bedroom you’re heating and cooling for two people because everyone else launched.

Sometimes the cost is in dollars after all. Keeping the wrong house can mean paying for storage, driving farther on gas and time, or maintaining a yard and square footage you no longer use. And a too-small house has a way of extracting renovation money that never fully comes back at resale.

None of this says move. It says weigh it. A 3% rate on a house that fits your life is a treasure. A 3% rate functioning as the reason you live somewhere that doesn’t work is a discount on the wrong product.

The workarounds that shrink the rate gap

Before you frame this as keep-the-rate versus pay-full-freight, know the middle paths, because several of them are underused.

A bigger down payment is the blunt one: every extra $10,000 of equity you put down saves you interest at the new rate for as long as you hold the loan, and shrinking the balance is the one lever fully in your control.

Temporary buydowns are back in a big way, especially on new construction around the Memphis suburbs. Builders and some sellers will fund a 2-1 buydown that cuts your rate roughly two points the first year and one the second, which turns the payment shock into a ramp while you settle in. On newly built homes, incentives like these are part of why the affordability picture locally is better than the headlines suggest.

Assumable loans are the sleeper. FHA and VA mortgages can often be assumed by a qualified buyer, meaning the buyer takes over the seller’s existing rate. If you’re selling a home with an assumable 3% loan, that’s a marketing asset worth real money to the right buyer. If you’re buying, it’s worth asking whether the loan on a home you love can be assumed, though you’ll need cash or a second loan to cover the seller’s equity.

And refinancing later remains a live option, not a fantasy. Forecasts have rates drifting in the high-5s to low-6s over the next year rather than crashing, so don’t buy on a payment you can only afford at some imagined future rate. But if rates do slide, you can chase the lower number then. You can refinance a rate. You can’t refinance a house into having another bedroom.

When keeping your low mortgage rate wins

Sometimes the frozen choice is the right choice, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

If your current house fits your life for the next five or more years, staying is probably right. The rate advantage compounds over time, and there’s no lifestyle deficit eating away at the other side of the ledger.

A lateral move rarely clears the bar either. Same size, same area, mostly a change of scenery: paying a higher rate plus selling and moving costs to end up in essentially the same house is the one scenario where the lock-in logic holds completely.

And if your time horizon is short or uncertain, a job that might relocate you again, a lease-versus-buy situation in flux, the transaction costs of moving twice will outweigh most other factors. Renting out your current home instead of selling can make sense for some owners in that spot, but go in clear-eyed: being a landlord is a job, and Tennessee’s landlord-friendly reputation doesn’t make 2 a.m. water heater calls answer themselves.

When moving wins even at today’s rates

The case for moving is strongest when three things line up: the house genuinely doesn’t fit, your equity is substantial, and the move changes something durable, like school zone, commute, or space for family.

Memphis-area sellers are in a better spot for this than most of the country. Homes here still close near asking when priced right, inventory has loosened enough that you can actually find your next house before listing, and the market conditions favor sellers who prepare over sellers who wing it. Buyers with equity to deploy also blunt the rate problem in a way first-timers can’t, which is why so much of the current market is equity-rich households trading with each other.

There’s also a quiet timing point. The homeowners most locked in are five or six years into loans they got in 2020 and 2021, which is right around the point Americans historically move anyway. Waiting another two years for a rate that forecasts say may not come, while the kids finish growing up in the wrong school zone, is a bet with a hidden price on it. If you want the market-level view of how this standoff has been easing, we covered it in the lock-in effect is finally breaking, and the buy-now-or-wait question gets its own treatment in is it better to buy now or wait for lower rates.

How to run your own numbers

Do this on one sheet of paper. On the left: your current balance, rate, and payment, plus what your home would realistically sell for. On the right: the price range of the house that would fix what’s wrong, the loan you’d need after your equity, and the payment at today’s rates. The gap between the two payments is the true monthly cost of moving.

Then put that gap next to what staying costs you. If the payment difference is $650 and the problem is you’d mildly prefer a bigger kitchen, keep your rate. If it’s $650 and you’re driving 90 minutes a day, sleeping in a converted dining room, or a decade past needing the stairs to go away, that’s not a hard question. It’s an uncomfortable one, which is different.

We’re happy to run the numbers side with you before you decide anything. A quick conversation about what your home would bring and what your target neighborhood costs turns this from a feeling into a decision. Reach out to our team and we’ll put your actual figures on that sheet of paper.

The rate is worth something. The right house is worth more, and now you know how to price the difference.

No Comments

Buyer’s Agent vs Seller’s Agent

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: First Time Home Buyers,First-Time Buyers,For Buyers,For Sellers

(Updated August 7, 2026)

You’ll hear both terms in your first week of thinking about a move: buyer’s agent, seller’s agent. Same license, same MLS access, often the same brokerage. But the two jobs pull in opposite directions, and understanding the difference between a buyer’s agent and a seller’s agent tells you a lot about how your deal will go, who is fighting for your side of it, and what you should expect from the person you hire.

The short version: a seller’s agent works to get the seller the highest price and cleanest terms. A buyer’s agent works to get the buyer the right house at the lowest workable price. Everything else about the two roles flows from that split. The rest of this post covers what each one does all day, how they get paid, and the Tennessee-specific wrinkle that surprises a lot of people.

What a seller’s agent does

A seller’s agent, also called a listing agent, is hired by the homeowner. Their job starts weeks before the sign goes in the yard: walking the house and recommending which repairs and touch-ups will return more than they cost, pricing it against what has sold nearby in the last few months, and getting photography that makes a Bartlett three-bedroom stop a scrolling thumb.

Once the home is listed, the seller’s agent runs the selling machine. Marketing, showings, feedback calls, and then the part that earns the fee: fielding offers. Relaying numbers is the easy part. The judgment is in weighing a higher offer with shaky financing against a lower one with a strong pre-approval, pushing back on inspection repair lists that overreach, and keeping the deal glued together through appraisal and closing. When we’re selling a client’s house, most of the real work happens after the offer is accepted, where deals quietly fall apart if nobody is managing them.

One thing to be clear about: the seller’s agent is friendly to everyone, but works for the seller. When you call the number on the yard sign and ask questions, everything you reveal (“we need to move by June,” “we could go higher if we had to”) can inform the seller’s side of the negotiation.

What a buyer’s agent does

A buyer’s agent is hired by the buyer, and their day looks different. It starts with narrowing the map. Memphis isn’t one market: the same monthly payment lands you in very different houses in Cordova, Collierville, and Midtown, and a buyer’s agent’s real value early on is knowing which streets, school zones, and price bands fit what you’re trying to do. That’s especially true for people buying their first home in Memphis, who usually start with a neighborhood list built from rumor.

Then the job becomes protection. A buyer’s agent points out the foundation crack the photos didn’t show, pulls the sale history that says the house has been quietly relisted three times, and builds an offer strategy that fits the situation, whether that’s competing against multiple offers without overpaying or asking for concessions on a house that has sat for sixty days. After inspection, they negotiate repairs. Before closing, they chase down every document and deadline so your earnest money stays safe.

The buyer’s agent’s loyalty runs to you. What you tell them stays on your side of the table.

Who pays whom

For decades the standard answer was “the seller pays both agents,” and in practice that’s still common, but it’s worth understanding how it works now. Commissions have always been negotiable, and since the industry rule changes in 2024, buyers generally sign a written agreement with their agent up front that spells out what the agent’s fee is and where it can come from. Often the seller still covers it as part of the deal. Sometimes it’s negotiated as a seller concession. The point of the paperwork is that nobody’s fee is a mystery anymore.

For sellers, the commission conversation happens at the listing appointment, and it’s a legitimate thing to ask about plainly. For buyers, don’t let the agreement scare you off: it mostly formalizes what was already true, and it means your agent’s obligations to you are in writing. Fees and closing costs vary by deal, and we broke down the actual numbers in what buyers and sellers pay in closing costs in the Memphis area.

The Tennessee wrinkle

Here’s the part that surprises people. In Tennessee, an agent doesn’t automatically represent you just because you’ve been touring houses together. Without a written agency agreement, a licensee can work as a “facilitator,” helping the transaction along without owing exclusive loyalty to either side.

It’s simply the default setting under state law, and it’s why the paperwork matters more here than buyers expect. If you want an agent who is contractually on your side, in negotiations, with your confidential information, say so and sign the agency agreement that makes it official. Any agent worth hiring will be glad you asked. If you’re interviewing candidates, our guide on choosing a local real estate agent covers the questions that separate the pros from the license-holders.

One agent working both sides

Sometimes the listing agent offers to write up your offer too. It’s legal in Tennessee with disclosure, and on a simple deal it can work. But be honest with yourself about the geometry: one person cannot simultaneously get the seller the most money and get you the best deal. In those arrangements the agent typically shifts into a neutral role, which means nobody in the transaction is purely advocating for you.

Where this comes up most is new construction, where the builder’s on-site agent is warm and helpful and entirely the builder’s. We wrote about why having your own agent matters when buying new construction, and the logic extends to any deal: the friendly person at the model home or the open house already has a client, and it isn’t you.

When you’re doing both at once

Plenty of Memphis moves involve both roles at the same time: selling the Germantown house while buying in Arlington. This is where using one team for both sides genuinely helps, and the advantage is timing. Coordinating a sale and a purchase means sequencing two closings, and the order you do it in has real tradeoffs. We walked through those in sell before buying, or buy first?, and it’s the single conversation we’d most recommend having before you list anything.

Two jobs, one closing table

Buyer’s agent and seller’s agent are the same license doing opposite jobs, and the system works because each side has a professional whose loyalty is spelled out on paper. The practical takeaways are short: know who the agent in front of you actually works for, get your own representation in writing, and be careful what you tell the other side’s agent at the open house.

If you’re on either side of a Memphis move, or both sides at once, we’re happy to talk through what representation would look like for your specific situation. No pressure, just clarity about who’d be in your corner.

No Comments

The Best Time of Year To Buy a Home Around Memphis

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Affordability,Buying Tips,For Buyers,news

(Updated 8/03/26)

Ask ten people the best time to buy a house and you’ll hear ten confident answers. Spring, because that’s when the houses are. January, because that’s when the deals are. Whenever rates dip. Whenever you’re ready.

The honest answer for Memphis is that the calendar gives you real advantages, but different ones in different seasons, and the right month depends on which advantage you need. If your priority is price, winter is your friend. If it’s choice, spring. If you want a bit of both, fall is quietly the best-kept secret in the local market. We work all four seasons, and each one has a personality worth knowing before you start your search.

What the seasons do to the Memphis market

Memphis follows the national rhythm: listings swell in spring, peak in early summer, thin out through fall, and hit bottom around the holidays. Buyer traffic follows the same curve, and that’s the part people miss. The number of homes matters less than the ratio of buyers to homes, because that ratio is what decides whether you’re negotiating or competing.

Seasonality is real, but it’s a thumb on the scale, not a magic discount. The gap between the best and worst month to close is typically a few percent on price, not twenty. What changes more dramatically is everything around the price: how many offers you’re up against, how willing sellers are to cover closing costs or repairs, and how much time you get to think before someone else buys the house.

Winter, when buyers hold the leverage

December through February is the quietest stretch of the Memphis market, and quiet is exactly what a price-focused buyer wants.

Most buyers disappear over the holidays and stay gone until spring. The sellers still listed in January are usually there for a reason: a job relocation, an estate, a house that didn’t move in the fall. Motivated sellers plus empty open houses is the best negotiating setup the calendar ever hands you. This is when we see closing cost credits, repair concessions, and below-ask offers accepted with the least resistance, the kind of terms that take a bidding war to get anywhere near in May.

The trade-off is selection. Winter inventory is the year’s thinnest, so you’re choosing from fewer homes and some compromise is likely. Showings in the cold have an upside people forget, though: you’re seeing every house at its worst. Drafty windows, a struggling furnace, and standing water in the yard all show themselves in January in a way they never will at a June open house.

Spring, when the market gives you choice

March through May is when Memphis inventory blooms. Families list so they can close before the next school year, and for a few months you’ll have the widest selection of the year in nearly every neighborhood and price point.

Spring is the right season for buyers with specific needs. If you’re set on a particular school zone or a floor plan that rarely comes up, your odds of finding it are simply better when the most homes are for sale. Our home buyer’s guide to Bartlett is a good example of the kind of targeted search where spring selection pays off.

The bill for that selection is competition. Every buyer who hibernated all winter shows up at the same open houses you do, and well-priced homes in popular areas draw multiple offers within days. You’ll pay closer to asking, sometimes over it, and you’ll have less room to ask for concessions. If you’re shopping in spring, go in prepared: we wrote a full playbook on winning against multiple offers without overpaying, and spring is the season it earns its keep.

Summer, the family-move window

June and July run on the school calendar. Inventory stays strong, closings peak, and families race to be unpacked before the first bell. Competition stays real but eases a notch from the spring frenzy, especially on homes that have been listed for a few weeks.

Late summer is where it gets interesting for bargain hunters. A house that hit the market in April and hasn’t sold by August has a tired seller behind it, and price cuts cluster in this stretch. Watching days-on-market becomes a strategy in itself: the longer a home has sat through the busy season, the more conversation there is to be had about price and terms.

Fall, the sweet spot most buyers skip

September through November might be the best overall value on the Memphis calendar, and it’s the season fewest buyers plan around.

The spring and summer crowds are gone, but the market hasn’t emptied out the way it does in December. You get a workable amount of inventory, including summer listings whose sellers are now genuinely motivated, with a fraction of the competition. Sellers who want to be done before the holidays negotiate like it. For buyers who want decent selection and real leverage at the same time, fall is the compromise season that doesn’t feel like much of a compromise.

A month-by-month cheat sheet

MonthsWhat you getWhat it costs you
Dec–FebMax negotiating leverage, motivated sellersThinnest selection of the year
Mar–MayWidest selection, new listings dailyMost competition, strongest prices
Jun–JulStrong inventory, school-calendar timingCompetition still real
AugPrice cuts on stale summer listingsSelection starting to thin
Sep–NovLeverage plus workable inventoryFewer brand-new listings each week

The best season for your situation

A first-time buyer with flexibility on timing gets the most from winter and fall, when there’s room to negotiate and time to think. Start with our guide to buying your first home in Memphis, and whatever season you choose, get pre-approved before you start the house hunt. In winter it makes you the serious buyer in a quiet market; in spring it’s the ticket that gets your offer read at all.

A family targeting a school district should lean spring, accept the competition, and win on preparation. And if you have a house to sell first, the seasons cut both ways, since the market you’re selling into is the same one you’re buying from. We covered how to sequence that in selling and buying at the same time.

Pick your season, then work it

The calendar deals every buyer a different hand, but any season works when you play it for what it offers: leverage in the winter, selection in the spring, tired listings in late summer, balance in the fall. What doesn’t work is waiting for a perfect month that the data says doesn’t exist.

If you tell us what you’re optimizing for, we can tell you when your market is, and what it looks like in the neighborhoods you care about right now. Reach out to the team and we’ll map it out together.

No Comments

How To Negotiate a House Price in Memphis (2026 Guide)

Author: Reid Realtors
Categories: Buying Tips,For Buyers,For Sellers,Selling Tips

(Updated 7/31/26)

A $285,000 house in Germantown hits the market on a Friday. By Monday there are two offers. Neither is full price. The seller counters both. One buyer folds. The other negotiates $4,000 in closing cost credits and a home warranty, pays asking price, and closes in 30 days.

That back-and-forth is what the Memphis market looks like right now. Not a frenzy, not a drought. Inventory sits around two to three months of supply across the metro, and the median home price in Shelby County hovers near $270,000. Homes that are priced right move in 30 to 40 days. Homes that aren’t sit and collect price cuts.

In a market like this, real estate negotiation strategies matter more than they have in years. Neither buyers nor sellers hold all the leverage, which means the deals that close well tend to hinge on how you negotiate as much as what you offer. This guide covers how to negotiate a house price in Memphis right now, from Collierville subdivisions to East Memphis bungalows, whether you’re the buyer or the seller. And it goes past price into the terms where most of the real money changes hands.

Four rules that apply to every deal

Before the buyer-specific and seller-specific tactics, there are rules that hold no matter which side of the table you’re on.

Always ask. The worst answer you’ll get is no. We’ve watched buyers leave thousands on the table because they assumed a seller wouldn’t negotiate on closing costs and never brought it up.

Keep the conversation alive. Dead negotiations don’t close. Even when a counter seems unreasonable or an offer feels low, responding keeps options open. The moment communication stops, the deal is over.

Make every concession count. If you agree to something the other side wants, get something back. You’re not being difficult. You’re making sure both parties feel like they gained something, which is how deals close in a balanced market.

Keep your emotions in check. This is the hard one. Buying or selling a home is personal. But the moment frustration or excitement starts driving the decision, you’re negotiating from a weaker spot, and the other side can usually tell.

How buyers should negotiate in Memphis right now

Buyers in the Memphis metro have more room to negotiate than they’ve had since before the pandemic. But “more room” doesn’t mean sellers accept anything. You still need a strategy, and it needs to be built on data.

Get pre-approved first

This isn’t optional. A mortgage pre-approval letter tells the seller you’re financially qualified and ready to move. In neighborhoods like Bartlett and Arlington, where well-priced homes still draw multiple offers, a pre-approved buyer beats an unverified one every time.

Talk to your lender before you start browsing. Know your rate, know your ceiling. When the right house comes up, you want to write an offer that day, not scramble for paperwork. If you’re buying your first home in Memphis, this step alone puts you ahead of half the competition.

Negotiate beyond the price tag

The purchase price gets all the attention, but experienced buyers know the real savings often come from other terms. In a balanced market, a seller who won’t budge on price may be open to:

  • Seller-paid closing costs, saving you 2 to 3% of the purchase price upfront
  • A rate buydown, where the seller contributes toward lowering your mortgage rate
  • Personal property like appliances, window treatments, or outdoor equipment
  • Home warranty coverage for the first year

We closed a deal in Cordova earlier this year where the buyer paid full asking price but got $8,000 in seller concessions toward closing costs and a two-year home warranty. The seller was happy with the price. The buyer kept more cash in their pocket. That’s the kind of closing cost negotiation that works when both sides feel like they won.

How a rate buydown works

Rate buydowns have become one of the most useful negotiating tools in this market, and a lot of buyers don’t fully understand them. There are two common types.

A temporary buydown, like a 2-1 buydown, drops your rate by two points the first year and one point the second year before settling at the note rate. The seller funds it at closing. It lowers your payment while you settle into the house, which helps if you expect income to rise or plan to refinance if rates fall.

A permanent buydown uses seller money to buy down the rate for the life of the loan through discount points. It costs more upfront but lowers your payment for as long as you own the home. When a seller is stuck on price but motivated to sell, asking them to fund a buydown instead of cutting the price can be worth more to you than the price reduction would have been. Run both scenarios with your lender before you decide which to ask for.

Target homes that have been sitting

A home listed for 50 or 60 days in this market is sending a signal. Maybe the price is off. Maybe the photos don’t do it justice. Whatever the reason, that seller is more motivated than someone who listed yesterday.

Average days on market across the metro in 2026 runs 30 to 40 days depending on the neighborhood. Germantown and Collierville tend to move faster. Anything sitting well above 40 days gives you leverage to negotiate harder on price, terms, or both. You can explore how these suburbs compare to get a feel for what’s normal in each area.

Build your offer on comparable sales

Your offer should come from data, not a gut feeling. What did similar homes in that subdivision sell for in the last 90 days? What’s the price-per-square-foot trend? Are homes in that zip code selling above or below list?

When you work with an agent who knows these neighborhoods, they’ll pull those numbers before you write. Comparable sales data is the strongest negotiating tool you have because it takes emotion out of the conversation. You’re not saying “I think this is overpriced.” You’re showing what the market paid for similar houses.

Winning a multiple-offer situation without overpaying

Even in a balanced market, the best homes still draw competing offers. A move-in-ready house in a good school district, priced near market value, can pull three or four offers in a weekend. The trick is competing hard without wrecking your own budget. Our full guide on winning a multiple-offer situation goes deeper, but a few negotiation levers matter most.

An escalation clause lets you automatically beat competing offers up to a cap. You might offer $300,000 and agree to top any verified competing offer by $2,000, up to a ceiling of $315,000. It keeps you in the running without forcing you to guess high from the start. Use it carefully, because some sellers and agents dislike them, and they reveal your maximum.

Clean terms often beat a higher number. A seller choosing between a $305,000 offer with a financing contingency and a 60-day close, and a $300,000 offer with strong pre-approval and a 30-day close, frequently takes the lower, cleaner one. Shortening your contingency windows, being flexible on the closing date, and putting down a larger earnest money deposit all signal you’re serious without raising your price.

If you lose, ask about backup position. Deals fall apart regularly. Financing fails, inspections turn up problems, buyers get cold feet. A clean backup offer can turn into the winning one a week later.

Negotiating the appraisal gap

This is the part of the deal that catches buyers off guard most often. You agree on a price, then the appraisal comes in below it. The lender will only finance against the appraised value, which leaves a gap between what you offered and what the bank will lend.

Say you’re under contract at $310,000 and the appraisal lands at $300,000. That $10,000 difference has to be resolved before the deal closes, and there are a few ways to handle it.

The seller can lower the price to the appraised value. This is most likely when the market has cooled and the seller knows the next buyer’s appraisal will probably come back the same. You can meet in the middle, with the seller dropping the price part of the way and you covering the rest in cash. Or you can cover the full gap yourself with cash on top of your down payment, which only makes sense if you have the funds and really want the house.

If you’re a buyer worried about this, talk to your agent about an appraisal contingency, which lets you renegotiate or walk if the number comes in low. If you’re a seller, pricing accurately from the start is your best defense, because a home priced at the market rarely has appraisal problems. When you’re competing as a buyer, offering limited appraisal gap coverage (agreeing to cover up to a set amount) can make your offer stronger without exposing you to an unlimited risk.

Negotiating after the home inspection

Plenty of deals are won or lost in the days after the inspection report comes in. The buyer signs a contract, the inspector finds issues, and a second round of negotiation begins. How you handle it matters as much as the original offer.

For buyers, resist the urge to send a laundry list of every cosmetic flaw. Sellers tune out a 30-item repair request, and you lose credibility on the things that count. Focus on what’s material: the HVAC system at the end of its life, the active roof leak, the electrical panel that won’t pass insurance. Ask for those to be repaired, or ask for a credit so you can handle them after closing.

For sellers, a repair request isn’t an attack. It’s a continuation of the deal. You can agree to the work, offer a credit instead, or counter with a partial fix. A buyer asking for $3,000 in repairs after a smooth inspection is usually still a buyer who wants the house. Countering at $1,500 keeps the deal alive far more often than refusing outright.

The repair-credit-versus-repair decision comes up constantly. A $200 electrical fix is easy to handle before closing. A $6,000 foundation concern is often better as a credit, where the buyer picks their own contractor and controls the scope. Your agent will know which approach fits the situation and your local market.

Seller negotiation tactics that close deals

Selling in a balanced market means you can’t plant a sign and wait for a bidding war. You need a plan. These seller negotiation tactics separate homes that sit from homes that sell on good terms.

Price it right on day one

This is the single most important decision you’ll make, and it shapes every negotiation that follows. Overprice by even 5% and you’ll watch the listing go stale while buyers negotiate aggressively on competing homes nearby.

With the Memphis median near $270,000 and buyers having access to real-time sales data, there’s no room to test the market with an inflated number. Price your home off recent comparable sales and you negotiate from strength. Price it above the market and you’re playing defense from the start.

Your listing agent should walk you through a comparative market analysis built from actual closed sales in your neighborhood. Not a Zestimate. A real analysis from someone who has sold homes on your street.

Always counter, even low offers

Sellers make this mistake out of emotion. A low offer comes in and the instinct is to ignore it or decline outright. But a low offer is still an offer. Someone wants your house. They’re testing.

Counter it. Even if the opening number is way off, a counter keeps the conversation alive. Some of the best deals we’ve closed started with offers that looked insulting on day one and turned into solid contracts after two rounds.

Think about the full picture when you counter

Don’t just drop your price by $2,000 and send it back. Consider what the buyer is really asking for.

If they want closing cost credits, can you offer a smaller amount rather than rejecting the request? If they want a fast close, can you accommodate that in exchange for a higher price? If their offer depends on selling their current home, how does that affect your timeline? Our post on whether to sell before buying or buy first walks through those timing trade-offs. Strategic counters show the buyer you’re engaged, and they reveal what the buyer actually cares about, which is information you can use.

Get inspected before you list

A pre-listing inspection costs $300 to $500 and takes one of the buyer’s strongest negotiating tools off the table. When a buyer’s inspection turns up surprises, they’ll use those findings to renegotiate, sometimes aggressively.

If you already know about potential issues and have either fixed them or priced accordingly, there’s nothing for the buyer to come back with. You control the story instead of reacting to it.

Document every upgrade

Replaced the roof in 2024? New HVAC? Updated kitchen? Keep the receipts, warranties, and permits ready.

When a buyer tries to talk your price down, documented upgrades give you concrete reasons to hold firm. “The roof is two years old with a transferable 30-year warranty” is a much stronger position than “we think the roof is fairly new.”

Deal terms that don’t involve the price

Some of the best negotiation in Memphis real estate right now happens around terms that have nothing to do with the number on the contract.

Closing cost credits

Instead of lowering the sale price, the seller offers a credit toward the buyer’s closing costs. This keeps the sale price intact, which matters for the appraisal and future comps, while cutting the buyer’s cash needed at closing. For a buyer in the $250,000 to $350,000 range common across Bartlett and Arlington, a 2 to 3% credit means $5,000 to $10,500 less out of pocket at the table.

Contingency timelines

Most offers include contingencies for inspection, appraisal, and financing. Those timelines are negotiable. A seller might agree to a longer inspection window in exchange for a higher price. A buyer might shorten their contingency periods to make an offer stand out. In a balanced market, these adjustments can be the difference between winning a deal and losing one.

Closing date flexibility

If a buyer needs to close in 21 days, or needs 60 because they’re selling another property, a seller willing to flex on the date adds value without giving up a dollar. Closing date flexibility is free leverage that many sellers underuse, and it often matters more to the other side than a small price change.

Leasebacks and possession dates

When a seller needs time to move, a post-closing occupancy agreement (a leaseback) lets them stay in the home for a set period after closing, sometimes rent-free as a concession. For a buyer who isn’t in a rush, offering a free two-week leaseback can win a deal against a higher offer that demands immediate possession. It costs you very little and solves a real problem for the seller.

Negotiating new construction is a different game

If you’re touring new builds, throw out some of the resale playbook. Builders negotiate differently, and understanding why saves you from leaving money on the table. With new construction prices down across the Memphis suburbs, there’s real room to work right now, but it usually isn’t in the base price.

Builders protect the base price because cutting it lowers the comps for every other home in the community. What they will do is pile on incentives: covering closing costs if you use their preferred lender, funding a rate buydown, throwing in upgrades like finished basements, appliance packages, or design center credits. A builder might not knock $10,000 off the price but will happily give you $10,000 in upgrades and another $5,000 toward closing.

Standing inventory is where the price itself moves. A finished spec home the builder is carrying at quarter’s end, or the last few lots in a closing-out phase, gives you the most leverage. Builders have sales targets, and a completed house sitting on their books costs them money every month. Bring your own agent to the first visit, because the on-site sales rep works for the builder, and you want someone negotiating for you.

Walking away is a real strategy

Not every deal is worth saving. Sometimes the other side’s demands are unreasonable. Sometimes the inspection changes the math. Sometimes the appraisal comes in low and nobody wants to bridge the gap.

Walking away isn’t losing. When you’re genuinely willing to walk, and the other side can tell, you negotiate from strength. The worst deals in real estate happen when someone feels stuck and agrees to terms they shouldn’t have.

For buyers, there will be another house. Memphis has solid inventory right now across Collierville, Germantown, Bartlett, East Memphis, Arlington, and Cordova, especially as more sellers list now that the lock-in effect is loosening. For sellers, if a buyer’s demands stay unreasonable after multiple rounds, the next buyer might be easier to work with. A week back on the market beats a bad deal.

Common questions about negotiating in this market

Can you still negotiate price in 2026? Yes. With two to three months of supply and homes averaging 30 to 40 days on market, most sellers expect some negotiation. The exception is a well-priced, move-in-ready home in a top school district, where you may need to compete closer to asking and win on terms instead.

How much should you offer below asking? There’s no fixed rule. On a home priced right that just listed, 2 to 3% under is a reasonable opening. On a home that’s sat 60-plus days, 5 to 10% under with documented comps to back it up is defensible. Your agent’s comparable sales analysis should set the number, not a percentage you read online.

What’s the most overlooked negotiation tool? Terms. Buyers fixate on price and ignore closing cost credits, rate buydowns, leasebacks, and closing date flexibility, which is often where a seller has the most room to move.

Your agent is your biggest advantage

Real estate negotiation isn’t just about knowing the tactics. It’s about reading people, understanding what the other side is really after, and knowing which neighborhoods appraise tight and which have room.

An agent who has closed hundreds of deals in the metro picks up on signals that data alone won’t tell you. They can read a buyer’s motivation from how an offer is structured. They know whether a seller’s counter is firm or has room. They know which builders are sitting on standing inventory and which lenders fund the cleanest buydowns.

At Reid Realtors, we negotiate Memphis real estate deals every week, from established Germantown communities to the growing neighborhoods around Arlington. If you’re getting ready to buy or sell in the Memphis area this year, we’d like to be your advantage at the table.

Search

Contact Us

Fill out my online form