by Calculated Risk on 2/20/2023 08:32:00 AM

Altos reports that active single-family inventory was down 1.5% week-over-week. Usually inventory bottoms in early February, so we'd expect inventory to bottom seasonally soon.

Here are the same week inventory changes for the last five years:

2023: -6.9K

2022: -1.8K 

2021: -10.5K

2020: +4.6K

2019: +6.7K

Click on graph for larger image.

This inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of February 17th, inventory was at 437 thousand (7-day average), compared to 443 thousand the prior week.   

The second graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.

The red line is for 2023.  The black line is for 2019.  Note that inventory is up from the previous two years (the record low was in 2022), but still well below normal levels.

Inventory was up 76.4% compared to the same week in 2022 (last week it was up 78.0%), and down 46.7% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week down 45.4%). 

A key will be when inventory starts increasing in 2023 - so far inventory has declined about 11.1% over the first seven weeks of 2023.

Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube.