by Calculated Risk on 1/27/2023 03:12:00 PM

Realtor.com has monthly and weekly data on the existing home market. Here is their weekly report released today from Chief Economist Danielle Hale: Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week Ending Jan 21, 2023. Note: They have data on list prices, new listings and more, but this focus is on inventory.

• Active inventory growth continued to climb with for-sale homes up 69% above one year ago. In January, the housing market built further on the impressive growth seen in late 2022. But there is still room for more. Even after surging more than 50% in December 2022, the number of homes on the market trailed pre-pandemic counts by nearly 40%.
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• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were again down, this week by 5% from one year ago. This marks the twenty-ninth consecutive week of year-over-year declines in homeowners listing their homes for sale, but this week’s decline was not only smaller than dip, the average decline in new listings so far this year is about half what we saw in the fourth quarter of 2022. As mortgage rates rose and the market shifted from a distinct seller’s market to one that might better be described as a nobody’s market, we saw homeowners retrench, and the number of new listings fell. Although the number of new listings is still declining, at the current pace we could see a reversal of that trend or more new listings than one year ago as soon as February.

Here is a graph of the year-over-year change in inventory according to realtor.com. 

In early 2022, inventory was declining rapidly, so the year-over-year change is up sharply.

An interesting note this week is that new listings were only down 5% from a year ago.   This is a significant change from December when new listings were down 21% year-over-year according to Realtor.com, and down 21.5% in the local markets I track.   Something to watch!