by Calculated Risk on 5/19/2022 02:58:00 PM

Realtor.com has monthly and weekly data on the existing home market. Here is their weekly report released this morning from Chief Economist Danielle Hale: Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week Ending May 14, 2022. Note: They have data on list prices, new listings and more, but this focus is on inventory.

• Active inventory moved convincingly into positive territory for the first time since 2019. While last week’s positive inventory improvement rounded to 0%, this week’s data built on that trend in a notable way, leading to the biggest year over year gain since March 2019. Our April Housing Trends Report showed that the active listings count remained 60 percent below its level right at the onset of the pandemic. This means that today’s buyers have just 2 homes to consider for every 5 homes that were available for sale just before the pandemic. In other words, homes for sale are still limited. However, more sellers combined with a slowing level of sales activity is causing a relatively rapid transition in conditions.

Here is a graph of the year-over-year change in inventory according to realtor.com. Note: I corrected a sign error in the data for Feb 26, 2022.

Note the rapid increase in the YoY change, from down 30% at the beginning of the year, to up 5% YoY now. It will be important to watch if that trend continues.

The previous week, inventory was unchanged YoY according to Realtor.com. That is close to the 1.5% increase that Altos reported for the similar period. I expect Altos to report a stronger year-over-year increase in inventory on Monday.