Altos Research: Existing Home Inventory at Record Low

"Investor/speculator activity merits attention"

Every Monday, I post some excerpts from the weekly Altos Research report. I recommend following Mike Simonsen on twitter.

Mike discusses their weekly data on YouTube here.

Here are Mike Simonsen’s tweets today:

Housing market continuing its relentless climb. Both median asking price and the price of the new listings ticked up this week. Median home price in the US this week is just over $370,000

Immediate sales continue unabated. A big chunk of all the new listings get offers and go into contract essentially immediately now. When this bull finally tires, immediate sales (light red portion here) will start to shrink as a percentage of the market.

Not surprisingly, with seasonally low new listings and unseasonable high demand, active inventory of unsold single family homes hit a new record low this week. Only 284,000 homes unsold on the market right now.

When do we start getting more inventory? March? April? May?

In any hot market, investor/speculator activity merits attention. Too much speculation is a bubbly signal. One way to track this in housing is by price increases. Spiking up to almost 6% of the active market, price increases are getting uncomfortable like last year.

This is all from Mike Simonsen at Altos Research.