Realtor.com Reports Weekly Active Inventory Down 2.4% YoY; New Listings Down 3.2% YoY

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 Oct 7, 2023

• Active inventory declined, with for-sale homes lagging behind year ago levels by 2.4%.

During the past week, we observed the 16th successive drop in the number of homes available for sale when compared to the previous year. This decline showed a slight improvement compared to the previous week’s -2.6% figure and inventory has been growing week-to-week over September and into October. However, despite this marginal improvement, inventory remained tight and came in 45.1% below typical pre-pandemic levels in September.

• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were down again this week, by 3.2% from one year ago. .

For more than a year we have seen a consistent decline in the number of newly listed homes compared to the same period in the previous year. This past week, the gap compared to last year remains low as new listings were only 3.2% lower. However, last year’s pace of new listings was already historically low due to a steady rise in mortgage rates at that time. While this autumn’s listing pace is expected to catch up to last year, it is still notably much lower than pre-pandemic levels as we expect homeowners to continue to feel “locked-in” by mortgage rates ...

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

Inventory was down 3.2% year-over-year - this was the sixteenth consecutive week with a YoY decrease following 58 consecutive weeks with a YoY increase in inventory.  

The YoY decline in inventory has been getting smaller recently but will likely stay down YoY for the remainder of 2023 since inventory was increasing late into the year last year.

New listings really collapsed a year ago, so the YoY comparison for new listings is easier now - and new listings are still historically very low.