Kingsport Spirit

A recent comparison of new-construction listings across nine Tennessee peer cities reveals a striking trend: Kingsport is undergoing one of the most rapid shifts in new-home availability anywhere in the region. While places such as Cleveland, Cookeville, Johnson City, Maryville, and Morristown currently list more total new homes, the year’s most dramatic movement belongs unmistakably to Kingsport.

Between February and December 2025, Kingsport’s new-construction inventory surged from 42 homes to 95—an increase of 126 percent. No other city in the dataset comes close. Morristown added 25 homes over the same period, Johnson City gained 19, Maryville gained 4, and several markets actually shrank: Cookeville fell by 12, Cleveland by 8, and Bristol (TN+VA) by 14. Kingsport is the only city whose share of total new-home listings doubled—from under 5 percent to nearly 10 percent of all inventory in the comparison set.

But Kingsport’s headline is not merely growth—it is the composition of that growth. The city now has one of the highest counts and the highest percentage of new homes priced under $300,000. Another large share sits in the $300,000s. Together, more than three-quarters of Kingsport’s new homes are under $400,000. This is precisely the price band that national housing analysts call the “missing middle”—the range that middle-income families can still realistically afford but that most markets have stopped producing.

In this nine-city comparison, only Cleveland rivals Kingsport in supplying this middle segment at scale. Cities like Johnson City, Maryville, Jonesborough, and Oak Ridge have shifted sharply toward $400,000–$700,000 product, with 50–80 percent of their new-construction inventory above the $400,000 mark. Kingsport, by contrast, has expanded the very segment other markets are losing. The February–December growth tells the story: Kingsport added 26 new homes under $300,000 and 24 homes in the $300,000s—by far the largest jump in attainable new construction of any city in the analysis.

For families relocating from Nashville, Knoxville, Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Northern Kentucky—metros where new-build prices have soared—Kingsport’s expanding supply of middle-class attainable new homes is a powerful competitive advantage. It offers an on-ramp into ownership that has vanished in many fast-growing markets across the Southeast.

Yet this momentum also exposes a structural gap. Kingsport has one of the smallest upper-end new-construction inventories in the comparison. Only a handful of homes priced above $500,000 were for sale in December, and the number actually declined from February. Meanwhile, cities like Johnson City, Maryville, and Jonesborough have far deeper pipelines in the $400,000–$700,000 range. For Kingsport, this means the city excels at serving middle-income buyers but lacks sufficient new product for higher earners who prefer new construction—a shortfall with fiscal implications for long-term tax-base diversity.

Kingsport’s future hinges on balancing these strengths and gaps. The city is now one of Tennessee’s most productive suppliers of the missing middle—the very housing type needed to support workforce growth, family relocation, and sustainable in-migration. But to widen its economic bandwidth, Kingsport will need a modest expansion of upper-end construction, not as a replacement for its strengths but as a complement.

For now, Kingsport stands out as one of the state’s most grounded and accessible new-construction markets—a place where growth is real, attainability is expanding, and opportunity remains within reach. In the current housing climate, that is no small achievement.