July's Birmingham-area numbers, and why the headline on them is wrong

The Alabama Center for Real Estate at the University of Alabama released its July report for the Birmingham area on August 31, 2026. It is the closest thing to an official read on the market that gets published monthly, so we go through it each time it lands.

One caution before the numbers, and it is the whole reason we bother writing these up. This is a Birmingham metro figure, built from Greater Alabama MLS data in connection with the Birmingham Association of Realtors (ACRE). It is not a Hoover number and it is certainly not a Riverchase number. ACRE says so itself, noting that pricing “will vary from neighborhood to neighborhood.” For what is happening on our streets, the Riverchase market dashboard is built from actual East and West Riverchase activity.

What the report says

All figures below are July 2026, for the Birmingham area (ACRE, August 31, 2026):

• 1,319 closed transactions, down 1.9% from 1,363 a year earlier, and down 3.2% from June. Sales are up 3.5% year to date.
• 4,328 active listings, up 2.0% from June and up 7.7% from a year ago.
• 3.3 months of inventory at the current sales pace, up from 3.1 months in June and 3.0 months in July 2025. ACRE puts the balance point between buyers and sellers at roughly six months.
• Median sales price $326,500, down 1.5% from June and up 0.5% from a year ago.
• 38 days on market on average, the same as July 2025.
• 114 new homes sold, 8.6% of all area residential sales, with new-construction sales up 16.3% year over year and a new-home median of $341,500.

Sales also came in below what ACRE expected: 1,319 actual against a forecast of 1,392, a shortfall of 73 units or 5.3%. Year to date the gap is 8,474 actual against 8,678 forecast, or 2.4% (ACRE).

The headline does not match the release

ACRE published this under the headline “Birmingham-area Average Sales Price down 1.9% year-over-year in July.” Read the release and the 1.9% is not a price at all — it is the drop in closed transactions, from 1,363 to 1,319. The pricing paragraph reports a median of $326,500, which is up 0.5% year over year. The text states no average sales price figure anywhere (ACRE).

We are pointing this out because that headline is the version that travels. It will get repeated as “Birmingham prices are down 1.9%,” and the underlying report does not support that sentence. If you see it that way somewhere this month, the release is linked above.

How we read it

Inventory is the number we would watch. Up 7.7% year over year, with months of supply moving from 3.0 to 3.3, is a market loosening slowly rather than turning. At 3.3 months it is still well short of the six-month balance point, so sellers have not lost their footing. Days on market flat at 38 fits that reading: buyers have more to choose from, but nothing is sitting.

None of that tells you what your street is doing, and we are not going to pretend a metro median says anything about a particular house. Riverchase East and Riverchase West have behaved differently from each other all year, let alone from the metro.