Tracking existing home inventory is very important in 2022.
Inventory usually declines in the winter, and this is a new record low for this series.
This inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.
As of February 18th, inventory was at 248 thousand (7-day average), compared to 334 thousand for the same week a year ago. That is a decline of 25.8%.
A week ago, inventory was at 250 thousand, and was down 27.5% YoY.
Inventory was down 0.7% from the previous week.
Compared to the same week in 2020, inventory is down 65.7% from 723 thousand.
Last year inventory bottomed seasonally in April 2021 – very late in the year – usually inventory bottoms by February. An early key in 2022 will be to watch if inventory bottoms earlier this year.
And here is a table of the year-over-year change by week since the beginning of the year. A possible early indicator might be if the YoY decline is less each week.
| Week Ending | YoY Change |
|---|---|
| 12/31/2021 | -30.0% |
| 1/7/2022 | -26.0% |
| 1/14/2022 | -28.6% |
| 1/21/2022 | -27.1% |
| 1/28/2022 | -25.9% |
| 2/4/2022 | -27.9% |
| 2/11/2022 | -27.5% |
| 2/18/2022 | -25.8% |
Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube.