by Calculated Risk on 12/08/2022 03:50:00 PM

Realtor.com has monthly and weekly data on the existing home market. Here is their weekly report released today from Chief Economist Danielle Hale: Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week Ending Dec 3, 2022. Note: They have data on list prices, new listings and more, but this focus is on inventory.

• Active inventory growth held steady with for-sale homes up 53% above one year ago. Inventory growth steadied this week, the first time in eight weeks that we didn’t see a larger yearly growth rate compared to the prior week. This move is even more impressive as it comes against a backdrop of smaller listing declines and growing time on market.
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• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were again down, but dropped only 8% from one year ago. This marks the twenty-second consecutive week of year-over-year declines in homeowners listing their home for sale, but was the smallest decline since July.

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

Note the rapid increase in the YoY change earlier this year, from down 30% at the beginning of the year, to up 29% YoY at the beginning of July.

Then the Realtor.com data was stuck at up around 26% to 30% YoY for 14 weeks in a row.  This was due to the slowdown in new listings, even as sales had fallen sharply.

Then the YoY change started increasing sharply again as mortgage rates increased.

This week was a change from the previous 3 months - no increase in the year-over-year change in inventory - even with a smaller decline in new listings (inventory is falling week-to-week, but the comparison is YoY).