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Flattening inventory

baristabarista
edited June 2008 in Seattle Real Estate
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?

Comments

  • AlanAlan
    It isn't in Tim's records, but the same thing happened last year. Inventory will take off again at the beginning of September.
  • jonjon
    There is a longer history here: http://www.alanpope.com/charts.htm
  • jonjon
    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.
  • deejayohdeejayoh
    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.
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