How Long Memphis Rentals Have Been Sitting on the Market

Of the 2,322 Memphis rental listings active on one national listing platform today, 1,063 have been on the market for more than two months. That is 46% of everything listed. 64% have been up a month or more, and only 23% went up in the last two weeks.

The four buckets

The median active listing has been up 51 days. This is the stock: what is sitting on the market right now. It is a different question from how long a new listing takes to lease, which we answer on how long Memphis rentals take to lease, and the two disagree on purpose. A listing that leases in three weeks passes through quickly and barely registers in a snapshot. A listing that is not renting shows up in the snapshot week after week. So a stock view always looks slower than a flow view, and the gap between them is the size of the stuck inventory.

Why the top bar is a floor

Our sweep counts from the day it first saw a listing, not the day the listing was posted. 961 of the 2,322 active listings were already up when the sweep reached full coverage in late June, so their true age is longer than we can measure. That only moves listings into the top bucket, never out of it. The over-two-months share is therefore at least 46%, and the three lower buckets are exact, because the sweep has now run for 72 days and anything younger than two months was seen on its first day.

If your rental is one of the ones sitting

Nearly half the market is in the top bar with you, so a listing that has sat two months is the Memphis norm rather than a sign that something is uniquely wrong with the house. It does mean the listing is not doing its job. The things we find most often on a stuck listing, roughly in order, are photos that undersell the house, a description that reads like a lease, showings that need a phone call to schedule, and an application that asks for too much too early. Price is on the list but usually not alone; our rent cuts vs raises page tracks what happens to listings that cut, and a cut by itself rarely rescues one inside a month.

A quick check on whether the number is the problem: run the address through what is my Memphis rental worth, which prices off comparable homes rather than a citywide figure.

How we count

One listing platform only. The property manager portals detect and drop listings on different schedules, and the same house is often on two of them, so mixing platforms would double count and blend two clocks. A listing counts as active when our nightly sweep verified it in the last three days, so a listing the sweep has lost is not counted as sitting. The full method is on how we source our numbers, and this chart lives with the rest on Memphis rental data.

Figures on this page are as of 2026-09-01 and refresh weekly.

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