Flattening inventory

[barista]

We are at 12875 today, June 18 for king county SFH which is not a huge leap from the May 18 numbers. Just a modest increase of 400. May 18 itself had a significant jump of about 900 homes in the same time frame as compared to April 18.

What explains this? Just a seasonality of numbers or is the supply really flattening out?

I remember we had a poll here about the estimated peak. What was the consensus number at that time?

[Alan]

It isn't in Tim's records, but the same thing happened last year. Inventory will take off again at the beginning of September.

[jon]

There is a longer history here: http://www.alanpope.com/charts.htm

[jon]

Looking at King county construction, http://www.alanpope.com/May08/King_NewCon_Res.pdf, it appears the builders were optimistic last fall for a spring bounce that didn't happen. Now that they have laid off some workers, inventory has leveled off.

[deejayoh]

inventory growth pattern is pretty typically rapid growth in the spring, flattening out in the summer, peaking in Sept/Oct and then dropping rapidly in the late fall/early winter.

Given we seem to be at something of a cyclical peak, I'm a bit amazed it seems to be following that pattern again this year. I expected it to top out and start trending back more to the norm.

The seasonal pattern for the last decade looks like this

Month|Avg
1 |89%
2 |89%
3 |93%
4 |100%
5 |107%
6 |108%
7 |108%
8 |108%
9 |112%
10 |108%
11 |100%
12 |80%

you can see we are pretty much on track for a normal pattern thus far.