Listing Inventory Is, Well, Listing

Posted by Jonathan Miller - Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 2:38 PM

[click to open article]

I’ve been talking a lot about the causes of falling inventory lately and some mortgage industry types seem to resistant to the idea that credit is keeping supply off the market, versus some sort of uniform national paralysis or sales surge (sales arent’ rising nearly as fast as inventory is falling).

Michelle Higgins at New York Times does a nice feature piece: Dear Owner: Please Sell: Faced With Apartment Shortage, Brokers Get Creative on how this shortage of inventory is changing the way brokers work to get inventory to sell.

But seriously, you’ve got to love the chart (at top) in the article – we provided ten year’s worth of monthly inventory trends to show the visual of just how low inventory has fallen. What’s amazing is the drop is happening in virtually every housing market I can think of.

Since credit is a national market and housing is local, I view this phenomenon as a byproduct of tight credit.