BiggerNews: Housing Inventory Up 24%, Are We Returning to “Normal”?

Dave:
Hi investors. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m your host today, Dave Meyer, and that means we have a bigger news episode. In these bigger news episodes, we take a look at some of the news, some of the data, some of the trends that are impacting our lives as real estate investors. And today we have a really cool episode. We have a great guest, Mike Simonsen from Altos Research. And if you’ve never heard or followed Mike’s work before, you’re gonna love this episode. ’cause Mike is one of the most experienced experts in housing market data that there is out there. He’s been doing this for over 30 years, and his company, Altos Research, provides some of the most up-to-date statistics that you can find on the housing market. And I know not everyone’s into statistics, not everyone loves data, but I think what you’ll find from learning from Mike is that stats can really help you make actionable decisions and informed decisions about your portfolio.
And it’s not like you need a degree, you don’t need to be good at math, it’s none of that. There’s just a couple of data points that you should be following that are gonna help improve your entire framework and investing decision making process. Today we’re gonna dig into just one stat in particular, it’s housing inventory. It really is one of the things that you really just have to understand as an investor if you wanna make strong informed decisions. And Mike, as I said, he really understands inventory better than anyone in the business. So with no further ado, let’s just bring on Mike from Altos Research to talk about the current state of the housing market and housing inventory. Mike, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. For those of our audience who don’t know you or your company, Altos Research, can you tell us a little bit more about it and how you’re involved in the investing industry?

Mike:
Sure. Well, at Altos, we track every home for sale in the country. Every week we do all the pricing, all the supply and demand, all the changes in that data. And we do, we bubble up the analytics on the housing market. We’ve been doing that for almost 18 years now. Um, and, and we, we work with realtors and mortgage loan officers helping buyers and sellers understand what’s happening in the market. But we also work with big financial firms and investors and home builders who need to be able to see right now what’s happening in the US housing market in any zip code in the country.

Dave:
Well, that sounds like something we want to hear about. You are truly, I think in the industry, you’re just known as like the inventory guy. You’ve always got like the best numbers on inventory, the most up-to-date stats. So we’re super excited to talk to you and as we’ll uncover over the course of this episode, inventory is really driving so much of the dynamics in the housing market. So Mike, let’s just start by having you give us a background on inventory and where it sits today.

Mike:
Yeah, so, uh, as of today, we’re recording, uh, in, uh, near the end of March here, the 513,000 single family homes on the market or on the country, another couple hundred thousand condos. But, um, but, uh, that is 513,000 is 24% more than last year at this time. Uh, it’s 102% more than two years ago. And if you, what that means really is, is like if you walk into the market today in the us, like these are the houses you can buy. Uh, there may be some listed tomorrow, there may be some that go into contract today or tomorrow, but these are the ones that are on the market right now. And, uh, and so 513,000 is sounds like it’s a lot compared to the last couple of years. It’s still pretty dramatically lower than the pre pandemic time, the last decade, uh, you know, it wasn’t that long ago when we would have, you know, maybe a million single family homes on the market around the, the country.
And right now there’s, you know, just over 500,000, 513,000, um, it’s been climbing each week and it’s been separating from last year. So last year at the end of March, inventory was still falling. We had more buyers and sellers. This year, inventory is building, and so it’s separating, you know, last week it was 22% more. The week before that it was 17% more. So, you know, we’re at 24% more homes on the market now than a year ago. Uh, and so that’ll keep climbing into, into April. Um, and, uh, and because that was when inventory turned last year. Okay,

Dave:
Great. Well, thank you for, for that deep background. It just, I wanna give a little public service announcement here for everyone because what you talked about here is so important is that the headlines that you see, that inventory is skyrocketing, things are going up, are true. As Mike just said, we’re up, you know, significant double digits over last year. We’re up a lot over two years ago. But it’s also really important when trying to understand housing market dynamics to take a historic view. And in this case, we can see that inventory is still, you know, roughly half of where it was, you know, not all that long ago. So it’s important to understand that context when you’re looking at these types of numbers. Now, Mike, I probably should have asked you this question first, but could you please explain for our audience what inventory is? Because there’s a lot of different things that are sort of similar. Like there’s new listings, there’s active inventory, there’s the total housing supply in the country. When we say inventory, what does that mean? When

Mike:
We say inventory, we’re talking about these are the houses that are on the market now that you can buy and it actually differs. And that’s the inventory number that Altos is tracking every week. And that we think is a, is like really valuable. You know, there are different numbers like the home builders, you might hear about new home inventory, but new home inventory includes things like, you know, vacant lots that have like a power drop to ’em, but there’s no home on ’em, right? And, and so we will like take those out of these inventory numbers. You can buy a home with, you know, air quotes there, but, but, um, but it’s not, it’s not actually a home yet. So, so we’re looking at like how, what, what are homes that you can buy right now? There’s, uh, new listings, you know, are the new sellers each week?
How many sellers are coming to, to market? And uh, and that’s an interesting number to watch also. Uh, and that’s interesting because, uh, last year the new sellers each week were very low record, few sellers, people selling homes last week, last year. And, uh, and so, um, the question is, this year, do we have more sellers finally starting to come back to market? And the answer is yes, we do. We have 14% more people selling homes this, this week than the same week a year ago. So starting to see growth in the number of sellers coming to market so inventory can grow from the new, the new sellers, it can grow from slower demand. That’s

Dave:
A great explanation, Mike. And just so everyone understands, these are two different metrics. So when you think about a housing market, you have buyers, right? That’s the demand side. You think about sellers, that’s the supply side. If you wanna just measure pure supply, like how many homes are coming on the market, how many people choose to list their property for sale, that is new listings. The second data point that Mike was talking about, what we’re primarily talking about today is inventory, which as Mike said, measures not just how many properties are being put on the market for sale, but also how quickly they are scooped up and come off the market. And so that’s why I think it’s such an important metric and we’re gonna dive into it today because it measures both supply and demand within the housing market, and that’s why it tells us so many things.
Okay, so we have now the lay of the land on what inventory is where it stands today, and we’re gonna get into how we think these metrics might change in the future right after this break. Welcome back investors. I’m here with Mike Simonsen talking about housing inventory in 2024, and let’s just jump right back into it. With that said, Mike, can you just give us a little bit of background on what the implications are for inventory? Like what does it mean that we have rising inventory that is still somewhat lower than it was pre pandemic? The

Mike:
Rising inventory, it means more selection for buyers. There are a lot of buyers, especially I’m sure you know, listeners to this podcast who are very sensitive to rate changes. And so they are maybe waiting until rates drop before they make a move. Um, what, uh, what we can see though right now is like that selection is starting to improve. Um, and, uh, so, and, and certainly over the pandemic, you know, the pandemic craziness starting to get back to more normal levels of selection. Um, when inventory rises multiple, uh, like year over year, uh, that is an indication, uh, for future price changes. So we have 24% more homes on the market now than a year ago. That implies that prices, that implies, uh, price, essentially softness, I’m calling it essentially flat pricing this year, um, for nationally. And, um, and so an implication of rising inventory is, you know, we have a, we have less, we have a, a different balance to demand versus supply than we did a year ago. A year ago we had more demand than supply in this moment. The year ended up five or 6%. Home prices ended up five or 6% last year. And you could see it right now because we had more demand than supply in, in, in this first and second quarter. And so now we see that shifted. We see de we see supply growing, and so that implies future, you know, softness. Now there’s no signal in the data for like price crashes, but those are some of the signals that we can see there.

Dave:
Thank you. Yeah, I, I think it’s important that everyone knows that inventory is often how we measure the balance of power, is the way, I guess is how you would say in the housing market, right? When inventory is extremely low as typically a seller’s market because there is more demand for homes than there are homes for sale in the market, giving sellers the power to dictate terms to negotiate price. This is what we saw during the pandemic, right? This is when people were waving contingencies and they were off making these crazy offers, uh, without seeing homes on the other side. If there is more inventory, if if inventory is high, that signals that there is more supply, there are more homes for sale on the market than there is demand that puts the power back into the buyer’s camp. That’s why we call it a buyer’s market.
And so this is one of the main reasons why looking at inventory is so important, especially, you know, we’re talking on national level too, but also looking in your individual market. Because even if inventory is doing one thing on a national scale, it might be totally different in another market like Mike. I don’t know how much you look at individual markets, but I think of a market I always pick on Austin these days ’cause it’s seeing the biggest correction, great city, no, no, uh, nothing against it. But you see inventory is just skyrocketed there over the last couple of years, and that is correlated to a correction in that market. Whereas you look at a lot of markets actually in the Midwest, northeast, they have a lot lower inventory and prices are really stable there. So just wanna make sure everyone understands why looking at this data is so important on a national and regional level.

Mike:
Yeah, and there are big differences in the national, in the lo the local markets right now. So, uh, right now the Gulf states, the gulf markets from southwest Florida around through Louisiana, down to some of the Texas markets have the biggest increases in inventory, uh, the biggest year over year increases in inventory, so all the way over to Austin. Um, Austin has more inventory now than any time in the last decade. And Austin is, has been a hot market for a decade. And so like it is the first time it’s getting back into a more balanced market. Uh, you know, and as rates rose the inbound, like the California migration, when rates are 3%, it’s very easy for someone from California to go like, oh, I’m just gonna bid a hundred thousand bucks over because, you know, it moves my payment by a couple hundred bucks a month.
And now they’re much le more sensitive to that. And so those offers don’t get made those houses build on the market, et cetera. Like that is what happens there. Uh, right now, uh, the southwest Florida markets all from Tampa all the way down Sarasota, Fort Myers, all of those markets have, uh, also inventory back to pre pandemic levels. So 2019 or earlier and still rising, uh, some of those markets. It’s, it’s a little, uh, it’s always a little tricky to go why? But some of the reasons that those in, that those markets are slowing and inventory is building is because, um, af post boom in the last few years, property taxes and insurance costs have risen dramatically in those markets. And so the holding costs for a home there has grown significantly. And, you know, contrast that to California where your property taxes don’t go up and uh, and California has just 7% more inventory now than a year ago just starting to grow positive.
There are five states now that still have less inventory than a year, than a year ago. Um, and those are like, it’s like New York and New Jersey and, um, and Illinois and like a few, but each week they’re get those that gap is narrowing. Uh, but, but still, like a lot of the Midwest and northeast as you mentioned, uh, are still just now coming off the pandemic lows of inventory. You know, we had dramatic lows and just now starting to climb where some of the Gulf states are are like back to, you know, pre pandemic level. So definitely different local things happening. Um, but in general, inventory is rising in all the markets and will continue to rise as long as rates stay high or move higher. If rates fall this year, let’s say they’re at seven now and they go to six and a half or 6.3 or something in the next few months, that trend’s gonna reverse. That will spur demand a lot of your listeners, right? Will go, Hey, I’ve been shopping at 7%, suddenly it’s 6.3, I’m making a move. That competition heats up and that, and so there, that will keep a cap on inventory, it’ll actually start bringing it down. Um, and, and, uh, but as long as rates stay, you know, here around seven or, or high or move higher, that will, uh, that means inventory will continue to climb in the year.

Dave:
All right. I do wanna touch on that, Mike, and talk about rates in just a minute, but I just wanna make sure everyone understands ’cause we’ve talked a lot and thrown out a lot of different data points here. But to me, and you know, jump in here Mike, if you think there’s something else here, but I think there’s two things if you wanna look at inventory in your local market and make sense to you, I think there’s two things you should be looking at. One is just the recent trend. So is it going up, how quickly is it going up? And then two, is the relationship to pre pandemic levels, because I think even if it’s gone up a hundred percent and it’s still half of where it was pre pandemic, that’s not necessarily a sign that prices are gonna start going down or anything like that. So if you wanna simplify this, those are two pieces of advice, two, easy to find data pieces that I would recommend. But Mike, do you have anything else you would add there?

Mike:
Yeah, and you know, we can watch. So I think that’s exactly the, the perspective to watch. So if you are thinking about buying in Southwest Florida and you can see, you know, Sarasota inventory is climbing right now, um, like that is absolutely something to pay attention to. And, or, or you know, if you’re selling, if you have investment properties in southwest Florida, like that gives a lot of insight into how you should price a property you might wanna sell. Um, we can watch interestingly, uh, the percentage of homes on the market with price cuts and, and actually know is that a lot. So is inventory rising and are, do we have more price cuts the normal, because that’s another signal about, uh, about where the impact of rising inventory. So for example, in, you know, Fort Myers, uh, about 50% of the homes on the market have had price cuts.
Right now that’s a little higher than normal and it’s on its way up. Like those are continuing to be softening signals for home prices, uh, and demand in, in Sarasota and Fort Myers in that, that area. Um, where, um, you know, a year ago Austin was rising inventory and was leading the country in price cuts. Uh, Austin’s further down the list now, which implies that even though inventory is up in Austin, it is, it has found a little bit of stability in the pricing. And so using both of those together can really be insightful because a lot of times people will look and they’ll go, wow, inventory’s rising, look out below right? Here comes the crash. And, and so it’s really useful to put a, a more, a little more context around it. Um, they’ll also sometimes go and they’ll say, they’ll go like, Hey, I’m looking around my neighborhood and there’s, I see four price cuts and, and that’s fine, but you know, it turns out it’s a normal level. Like normally about a third of homes take a price cut, you know, in Phoenix, normally 40% of homes take a price cut before they sell. And, and so you know, if Phoenix is, if you see one down the street that’s taking a price cut, that’s, that doesn’t tell you anything. You gotta look at the, at the actual trend over time.

Dave:
That’s a great tip. Thank you Mike. And I think that’s why it’s so important everyone to just look at data in your local market and try and get as full of a picture as you can and different stats. Um, and, and Mike give a great example there. Okay, time for one more short break, more on inventory with Mike Simonsen when we come back, stay with us. Welcome back to Bigger News. I am Dave Meyer here with Mike Simonsen of Altos Research. Let’s jump back in now. Mike, you mentioned interest rates. It is on top of everyone’s mind. Now, I love to play a game here on these podcasts and see if I can get our guests to make predictions about where mortgage rates are going. Are you willing to levy a prediction for us here?

Mike:
So I will start by saying, uh, that I don’t predict mortgage rates, uh, and that I have been wrong on mortgage rates for 30 years. <laugh>

Dave:
<laugh>. Okay, well then maybe we don’t wanna hear your prediction. Well,

Mike:
If you think about it, like, you know, I bought my first house, I bought a investment property in Chicago, a two flat in, you know, the mid nineties. And you know, I locked in for 30 years because I thought my 8% rate was a good rate and it, and it could only go up from there, right? And I bought my second house in 2001 and I locked in for 30 years because I thought rates could only go up from there. So, um, so that’s what I mean when I’ve been wrong for 30 years. But, um, uh, here’s what we know, um, here and, and, and like, so like I said, I don’t know where rates are going. What I do know is how the housing market will react if rates go up and how the housing market will react if rates go down. So, um, higher rates mean more inventory, uh, and you can think about it as demand slows inventory grows.
Uh, that is counterintuitive to a lot of people who right now are, are saying, I just wanna wait until rates fall because then we’re gonna get the inventory and I’m gonna get some selection. But it’s the actual, the data shows the opposite is true. We talked early about, uh, new listings, um, and some of those demand indicators. So when rates fall, you’ll get more sellers, but you’ll get more buyer competition. So if rates fall, demand spurs more than more than supply, so inventory actually falls if, if rates fall from here. So, um, you know, rates are right now about 7%. Um, we’ve been expecting, we being the experts have been talking about rates falling for 18 months and, uh, and they still have, you know, have not. And if anything they’re headed higher. Um, they’ve headed higher since January one. And, uh, and so, and as a result we can see the year over year inventory climbing in that time.
So rates, rates of climbing higher rates mean more inventory, lower rates mean more, I mean less inventory. And, and like I said, you can use the, the, the, think about it as demand slows inventory grows. So, um, so that’s really what we can see. We can also see like a, a jump in rates show up in a bunch of the other stats. So like we talked about price reductions and we’ve had rate mortgage rate spikes in September of last year. We had it in September of 22. Two big mortgage rate spikes at the end of the year, and almost to the day we can see the price reductions data turn up at exactly the same time. And what happens is, if I’m shopping now at 7% and some news hits and suddenly mortgages are at seven and a half or 7.6 or and marching towards eight, if I’m buying suddenly I don’t make that offer, the seller doesn’t get that offer.
A few more of those sellers say, wow, I gotta cut my prices spur demand. And so we can watch that impact like to the day of the mortgage rate increases. Uh, and likewise, if rates, you know, have been bouncing around here in the sevens for a month and now are sudden, then suddenly they move down into the mid sixes, the opposite happens. If I’ve been shopping at seven, a six and a half feels great. And, and that brings me to the second point that I like to make about mortgage rates, which is consumers are more sensitive to changes in rates than to the absolute levels. So, you know, if we’re at seven now, and by the end of the year we’re at 5.8, the market is gonna queue up to be very hot in 2025. Uh, it’ll be that adjustment of 120 basis points down and people will feel a lot, a lot of demand will get spurred there. Uh, likewise the other, the other direction can happen. So, so consume people are more, um, uh, are more sensitive to changes in rates than to the absolute levels.

Dave:
Okay, well you just dropped so much good information in there. Let’s, let’s unpack a couple of these things here. So first and foremost, when we’re talking about rates, you mentioned that we don’t know and that they might actually go higher. And I just want to clarify for everyone, there are a lot of different opinions about this. We don’t have time to get into why rates might go higher, why they might go lower, but I think one thing that we probably can all agree on is that there is a lot of uncertainty about rates. And the assumption that rates are gonna go down is not as concrete as I think a lot of people perhaps on social media or in the, the mainstream media are saying, and that just because the Fed is signaling that they’re gonna cut rates does not mean that mortgage rates are gonna go down.
They’re not tied to the federal funds, right? They’re tied to the bond market. It’s a whole other topic, but I think just I want to clarify that because people might hear, Mike, you say that rates might go up and they’re like, oh, I heard the Fed is gonna drop rates. So that’s number one. The second thing here that’s crucially important to our conversation here is about inventory. And as you said, inventory for those people who may be theoretically waiting for rates to come down and for inventory to go up, that is not what is likely to happen. Instead, like Mike said, when rates go down, that spurs demand probably more demand, and it, it will probably spur a faster increase in the demand side than on the supply side. And that creates more competition and that pushes up pricing. That’s what you’ve probably heard on this podcast or on the other podcast I’m on, on the market.
We talk about this a lot, that if rates go down, people say that they want that, but there also means they’re gonna face a lot more competition. And we might have the type of housing market dynamics that we saw during the pandemic, and I think this is important for investors, homeowners, whatever to internalize here is that everything’s about trade-offs. There is no perfect real estate market that you can invest in. You can invest right now where rates are higher, but there’s less competition. Some see that as a benefit, some see that as a downside if rates drop, that might make your monthly payment more affordable for a period, but prices will probably go up and you’re gonna be bidding like crazy. Some see that as a benefit, some see that as a detriment. So I think it’s just important to really, instead of saying now is a good time to buy, now is a good market thinking about here’s what’s good about this market and here’s how I can operate successfully in this market versus here’s what the future market might be and how I might have to shift my strategy in that market.

Mike:
Yeah, if you are the type of buyer who is, uh, able to compete with offers, like maybe you wait, uh, if you are the type of buyer who is, uh, has like, you know, got outbid 40 times you over the pandemic, maybe now is when you have the fewer bidders, right? That there, there’s definitely those, um, the those, uh, uh, dynamics at play. And um, you know, and, and like, I, I think the, um, the important thing though is that about about six months ago, a lot of people were asking me, Mike, if rates fall in 2024 as they were expected to six months ago, if rates fall dramatically in 2024, does, uh, would that potentially mean suddenly there’s a bunch of sellers who wanna sell, who’ve been waiting, uh, because they wanna move up and they can’t move up and, and so they’re locked in.
So that unleashes a bunch of inventory. And what if a a bunch of those sellers come out at the same time and therefore, uh, prices drop? And is that a, like, so that was a really common question about five, six months ago for me. And, and so you know that, because the assumption is that rates are high, so nobody’s selling, so therefore low rates would mean more inventory. And, and really what I try to help people understand is that the opposite is true. There’s lower rates mean less inventory. Like when we have more demand, I’m gonna, I’m gonna buy more and own more.

Dave:
That’s an excellent outlook for, for the next couple of years here, Mike, and, and an understanding of how people can navigate the market here. Before we get outta here, I’m curious your opinion on the long-term outlook for inventory and just for some historical context, inventory has been declining basically since the Great Recession, right? Like it spiked up during the great recession. I think it peaked in, correct me if I’m wrong, 2011, 2012, something like that.

Mike:
2012. Yep. And

Dave:
Then since then it’s been coming down pretty, you know, linearly and then it really sort of like dropped off during the pandemic. Do you think it’s realistic for us to think that inventory might ever get back to pre pandemic levels or back to levels that we saw in the early 2010s? Or like what, you know, is this the new normal that we should expect for years to come?

Mike:
So this is exactly the, the next corollary to the, to the interest rate discussion. So in that period, that last decade, 2012 through now, interest rates were generally falling. They were generally low and falling, uh, in that period. The one year that inventory rose year over year from like January to January was 2018 to 2019. And what happened in that year, mortgage rates rose by about a hundred basis points. They went from like four to five and inventory rose then, you know, 20, 20 rates dropped dramatically, inventory dropped dramatically. So now we’re two years into higher rates and we’re two years into more inventory. So you could imagine a world, it took us a decade down to get of low rates to get to the, the record few on the market. You could imagine a world of multiple years of higher rates that helps, that allows inventory to build back up.
Uh, so we’ve had two years of higher rates, we’ve had two years of rising inventory. If we have two more years of rates that are high or rising, that would, uh, allow, what happens is you think about the reason inventory has been falling over that decade is because of the investors. Like people that you know, love BiggerPockets, right? It’s like I’m buying my next house and at 3%, I’m keeping that first one for my, for my re my investment property. Now I have two now I do that a few times right now I have a portfolio and we did that 8 million times over the last decade. So now if rates are seven, I wanna buy the next one. I have to sell the first one to finance the next one. A few of those investment deals don’t pencil out, right? Those go back onto the market.
So inventory starts to build and, uh, and so it’s been two years, so multiple years of higher rates get us to build back to towards the old normal, you know, each year we have fewer people, everybody’s got a 3% mortgage, so nobody ever has to sell that house, but there’s 5 million home sales a year. So 5 million people have now a 7%, and they’re not locked in 10 million. We have 10 million people because we’re two years in now. And so, you know, two more years now, there’s 20 million people who aren’t gonna be able to keep that first one, you know, and so those go back into inventory. So over the, it’s a multiple year of higher rates that get us back to the old normal. And likewise, if rates start coming down again, then that’ll, that’ll stop that trend and, and things will tighten back up again. All

Dave:
Right, great analysis. I, I really appreciate that. I hadn’t really thought about that. How every year we go by, um, the, the lock-in effect is, is essentially getting diluted.

Mike:
Diluted, yep. 5 million people a year.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s super interesting and definitely something that we’ll have to keep an eye on. Luckily we have you the inventory guy to call next time. We need to talk about this. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast.

Mike:
Dave, I always appreciate it and I appreciate the work you guys do.

Dave:
Another big thanks to Mike Simonsen from Altos Research. If you wanna connect with Mike, you can always find his contact information in the show notes or show description. Just as a summary for everyone who is listening to this, there is a lot of discussion of data, different things that you could be tracking, different metrics, but if there’s one thing that I think you should take away from this episode is to keep an eye on inventory. I know there’s tons of different stats that you can follow, but inventory is so important because as I said during the episode, it measures both the supply side of the market and the demand side of the market. And as Mike so helpfully explained to us, if you track inventory in your local market, the trends, how it relates to historical patterns, you can get not just a sense of where housing prices might be going, but also help you establish your strategy for how you want to bid on a property.
For example, if you know that housing inventory is really high, you might bid at asking price or even try and bid a little bit below asking price because you know that supply is outsizing demand. In contrast, if you’re operating in a market where housing supply is really low, you know, you’re probably gonna have to be pretty aggressive with your offers. So by tracking just this one metric, you can learn a ton about housing market dynamics, both on a national level and in your local market. So go check it out. We will put a link to Altos Research. You can also find this data on Zillow. You can find on Redfin, uh, the realtor.com. This information is relatively easy to come by, so just Google it for your market and go do some research yourself. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer and I’ll see you soon.