Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Watch Inventory and Why Measures of Existing Home Inventory appear Different

A brief excerpt:

We are in a period of significant policy uncertainty and there isn’t a good historical analog for the current period. However, for housing, the key will be to watch inventory.

Existing home inventory will provide clues on house prices, and a combination of existing and new home inventory will indicate what will happen with housing starts.

Watch Inventory

Here are a few examples of when inventory helped me call some turning points for house prices (this section is an update to a previous article):

Starting in January 2005, I was very bearish on housing, but I wasn’t sure when the market would turn. Speculative bubbles can go on and on. However, the increase in inventory in late 2005 (see red arrow on graph below) helped me call the top for house prices in 2006.

Several years later, in early 2012, when many people were still bearish on housing, the plunge in inventory in 2011 (blue arrow on graph below) helped me call the bottom for house prices in early 2012 (see The Housing Bottom is Here).

There is much more in the article.

Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 2.3% week-over-week.
Inventory is now up 12.5% from the seasonal bottom in January and is increasing.  
Usually, inventory is up about 5% or 6% from the seasonal low by this week in the year.   So, 2025 is seeing a larger than normal pickup in inventory.
The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.
Click on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025.  The black line is for 2019.  
Inventory was up 33.4% compared to the same week in 2024 (last week it was up 34.7%), and down 17.5% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week it was down 17.4%). 
Inventory will pass 2020 levels soon, and it now appears inventory will be close to 2019 levels towards the end of 2025.
This second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.
As of April 11th, inventory was at 702 thousand (7-day average), compared to 691 thousand the prior week. 
Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube

Weekend:
• Schedule for Week of April 13, 2025

Monday:
• No major economic releases scheduled.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures S&P 500 are up 48 and DOW futures are up 250 (fair value).

Oil prices were down over the last week with WTI futures at $61.50 per barrel and Brent at $64.76 per barrel. A year ago, WTI was at $86, and Brent was at $93 - so WTI oil prices are down about 28% year-over-year.

Here is a graph from Gasbuddy.com for nationwide gasoline prices. Nationally prices are at $3.15 per gallon. A year ago, prices were at $3.60 per gallon, so gasoline prices are down $0.45 year-over-year.