by Calculated Risk on 11/04/2022 02:11:00 PM

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Realtor.com Weekly Inventory Up 40% Year-over-year; Now Above Same Week in 2020

A brief excerpt:

Here is a graph comparing the year-over-year change in the Realtor.com active monthly data to the inventory data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The dashed line is Realtor.com’s estimate of total inventory including pendings.

t appears the NAR includes some pending sales in their inventory data, and that accounts for the divergence in the year-over-year change over the last 2 years.

Housing economist Tom Lawler noted this in early 2021:

"As I’ve noted before, the inventory measure in most publicly-released local realtor/MLS reports excludes listings with pending contracts, but that is not the case for many of the reports sent to the NAR (referred to as the “NAR Report!”), Since the middle of last Spring inventory measures excluding pending listings have fallen much more sharply than inventory measures including such listings, and this latter inventory measure understates the decline in the effective inventory of homes for sale over the last several months."

The divergence between the NAR and other measures will probably disappear as the housing market slows.

The bottom line is inventory is still low, increasing, and the pace of growth has picked up again in recent weeks.

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