Nashville Feasibility Studies

Davidson County authorized 5,632 new private housing units in 2025 ¹. In the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates the county held 745,904 residents on July 1, 2025, against an estimates base of 715,887 on April 1, 2020, a change QuickFacts gives as 4.2% ¹. For the same July date it gives 721,074 for Nashville-Davidson (balance), a city geography inside the county, and a change of 4.6% from April 2020 ².

In the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate, the Census Bureau's Nashville-Davidson, Murfreesboro and Franklin metro area held 829,134 households, with a median household income of $85,447 and a median value for owner-occupied homes of $409,600 ¹⁷. The same 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate counts 292,294 residents aged 65 and over ¹⁷. Those four readings cover all fourteen of the metro area's counties: Cannon, Cheatham, Davidson, Dickson, Hickman, Macon, Maury, Robertson, Rutherford, Smith, Sumner, Trousdale, Williamson and Wilson.

Multifamily: where Nashville's apartments are being built

Three reports count Nashville apartments under construction. Yardi Matrix, in the report Multi-Housing News ran as “After Supply Surge, Nashville Navigates Transition,” counted 17,470 units in February 2026, with an average asking rent of $1,642 ⁷. Matthews' Q2 2026 report counted 11,486 units at an effective rent of $1,612 ⁹; MMG Real Estate Advisors, for the same quarter, counted 11,724 units at an effective rent of $1,586, with stabilized occupancy of 92.3% ⁸. The counts disagree: Yardi's February figure stands well above the two second-quarter counts, which sit close to each other, and the research records that the reports define the pipeline differently. Yardi's rent is an asking rent taken in February; the other two are effective rents for the second quarter ⁷⁸⁹. Matthews also puts vacancy at 5.40% in Q2 2026, against 6.21% in Q1 ⁹; MMG's 92.3% for the same quarter is a stabilized occupancy ⁸, a different measure, and the two are given with their publishers rather than turned into one figure. Northmarq's Q1 2026 vacancy reading for Downtown Nashville alone is 9.4% ²¹.

Yardi's report also says where its units stand: 2,735 underway in the Downtown submarket, 1,796 in Spring Hill, 1,588 in Gallatin and 1,572 in the Vanderbilt submarket in February 2026 ⁷. Matthews ranks its submarkets another way, by the pipeline set against the existing stock, and on that measure its Q2 2026 report names Franklin and Brentwood, where the pipeline equals 12.5% of inventory, and Hermitage, Mount Juliet and Lebanon, at 10.1% ⁹. Neither cluster the research gives is among Yardi's four, and the two lists measure different things: units underway and a share of the stock.

Our Huntsville page will place that metro's apartment pipeline by property; Nashville's record places its pipeline by submarket instead. Our Raleigh-Durham page reads Yardi Matrix's Raleigh market by stabilized occupancy and deliveries, whereas the Yardi figures here are units underway and an asking rent.

The fourteen-county metro area's median gross rent, taken over renter-occupied units paying cash rent of every age and size, was $1,528 in the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate ¹⁷; it describes the whole rented stock over five years, not a rent for new buildings. Our multifamily feasibility page covers how a new building's lease-up is tested.

Visit Music City's 2025 and the 2026 run to September 12

Visit Music City reports 67.0% occupancy and an average daily rate of $199.20 for calendar 2025, the rate 1.3% below the year before; the same source has room supply up 3.4% and room demand up 2.6% for the year, and revenue per available room down 2.1% ¹⁰. WKRN, citing the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, reported 69.4% occupancy for 2026 through September 12, up 3.2%, and room revenue of about $1.5 billion for the same months, up 5.9% ¹¹. Both readings trace to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, and this record holds no average daily rate for 2026. Hotels and motels other than casino hotels gave work to 13,873 employees in 2023 across the fourteen-county metro area, at 423 establishments in 2023 (County Business Patterns) ¹⁶. Those are counts of establishments, meaning locations with paid employees, and their staff across all fourteen counties, not a count of rooms, and they predate both visitors corporation readings.

Matthews on industrial space

In Q2 2026, by Matthews' count, Nashville had 9.2 million square feet of industrial space under construction, 8.0 million of it in the submarket Matthews calls East / I-40 and I-24, and Matthews reports more than 90% of the space under construction still available for lease ¹². For the same quarter it gives deliveries of 2.5 million square feet, net absorption of 137,000 square feet, vacancy of 7.30% across the market and 8.8% in East / I-40 and I-24, and asking rent averaging $11.70 per square foot ¹².

Avison Young on retail space under construction

The research found the vacancy reading in Avison Young's Q1 2026 Nashville report ambiguous, so this page carries only the report's construction figures: 599k SF of retail space under construction, a pipeline 33% smaller than a year earlier ¹³, the openings a retail study sets its trade area against.

FEMA's press release of February 6, 2026 on major disaster declaration DR-4898, for the severe winter storm of late January 2026, made Public Assistance available at first in 14 counties of the state, with Davidson, Williamson and Sumner among them ²². The release names counties, and this record takes no damage figure from it for any of the three. On April 10, 2026, FEMA's Amendment 3 to the declaration added Individual Assistance in further counties, Davidson and Williamson among them ²⁴.

No published case names a site in the fourteen counties of the Nashville metro area. The cabin resort case, set in unincorporated Blount County a few miles outside Townsend, tests whether new two-bedroom A-frames can carry SBA 504 debt while the two data vendors that track Townsend's rental market disagree on supply direction and occupancy, and a resort that broke ground in Townsend in September 2026 is due to open in 2027.