by Calculated Risk on 8/17/2023 01:37:00 PM

Realtor.com has monthly and weekly data on the existing home market. Here is their weekly report from Sabrina Speianu: Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week Ending Aug 12, 2023

• Active inventory declined, with for-sale homes lagging behind year ago levels by 8.6%.

This past week marked the 8th consecutive decline in the number of homes actively for sale compared to the prior year, however the gap narrowed slightly compared to the previous week’s -9.1% figure. The existing home sales pace has been roughly consistent at a low level in recent months, suggesting home shoppers are looking. But the continued drag from existing homeowners choosing to stay put is holding back overall inventory. We expect a dip of 5% for 2023 overall compared to 2022.

• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were down again this week, by 8.1% from one year ago.

For 58 weeks, there have been fewer newly listed homes compared to the same time one year ago. However, this gap has been shrinking as we start to compare against low new listings in the latter months of 2022. This week’s data shows a 5.9 percentage point improvement over last week as the market slowly trends in a more buyer-friendly direction. While it’s likely that we might see more new listings this fall than the previous year, inventory will continue to remain constrained as listings are still more than 20% below typical pre-pandemic levels seen this time of year.

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

Inventory was down 8.6% year-over-year - this was the eighth consecutive week with a YoY decrease following 58 consecutive weeks with a YoY increase in inventory.  

Inventory is still up from the record lows in the 2nd half of 2021 and early 2022, and it is unlikely we will see new record lows by this measure this year.