by Calculated Risk on 11/07/2022 12:09:00 PM

Active inventory decreased slightly.  Here are the same week inventory changes for the last four years (usually inventory is declining sharply at this time of year):

2022: -2.2K (smaller than usual decrease in inventory)

2021: -13.0K

2020: -13.4K

2019: -20.7K

Inventory bottomed seasonally at the beginning of March 2022 and is now up 138% since then.  Altos reports inventory is down 0.4% week-over-week. 

Click on graph for larger image.

This inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of November 4th, inventory was at 575 thousand (7-day average), compared to 577 thousand the prior week. 

Compared to the same week in 2021, inventory is up 43.5% from 401 thousand, and compared to the same week in 2020 inventory is up 8.5% from 530 thousand.  Compared to 3 years ago (2019), inventory is down 36.0% from 898 thousand.

Here are the inventory milestones I’ve been watching for with the Altos data:

1. The seasonal bottom (happened on March 4, 2022, for Altos) ✅

2. Inventory up year-over-year (happened on May 20, 2022, for Altos) ✅

3. Inventory up compared to 2020 (happened on October 7, 2022, for Altos) ✅

4. Inventory up compared to 2019 (currently down 36.0%).

Here is a graph of the inventory change vs 2021 (milestone 2 above), 2020 (milestone 3) and 2019 (milestone 4).

The blue line is the year-over-year data, the red line is compared to two years ago, and dashed purple is compared to 2019.

A key will be if inventory declines slowly during the winter months.

Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube.