by Calculated Risk on 3/07/2022 09:42:00 AM

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.

Click on graph for larger image in graph gallery.

This inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of March 4th, inventory was at 241 thousand (7-day average), compared to 318 thousand for the same week a year ago.  That is a decline of 24.2%. 

 A week ago, inventory was at 244 thousand, and was down 24.9% YoY.    

Inventory was down 1.4% from the previous week.

Compared to the same week in 2020, inventory is down 66.5% from 720 thousand.

Last year inventory bottomed seasonally in April 2021 - very late in the year. 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%
2/25/2022	-24.9%
3/4/2022	-24.2%

Based on the trend, it appears possible inventory bottomed seasonally last week, and will be up week-over-week in the next report.

Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube.