It is always fun to look at a “hockey stick” chart. Okay, fun might not be the correct word, perhaps “interesting” is more appropriate. Here you can see the country’s monthly supply spiking, so I thought we’d spend a few words on explaining why.
There are two things at play here:
Inventory is going up. It’s bouncing around and up and down, but the general trend line of late is up. There are more homes for sale. Many of these properties are ones that are lingering on the market longer, waiting for price reductions and in general, just sitting there longer.
Buyer demand is also moving up and down. However, with the recent interest rate bump married with seasonality starting to show up (we always slow as we move towards Halloween and into Thanksgiving), this has cooled off buyer demand a bit.
Buying a house is a very personal decision and I believe (and have said in my updates for years) that people buy because of timing in their life, not timing in the market. That won’t change today. That said, for the buyer who has been saying, “I’m going to wait for a lull in the market,” you might just have a window between now and New Years to see where you can fit in.