Stop me if you’ve heard this… Inventory. Still a big deal. Still not enough of it. Interest rates are low, vaccinations are in arms, and people feel better about what the future holds. Huzzah consumer confidence! Let’s keep looking at how both May looked as well as 2021 year-to-date.

 

I’m also going to put in the months of inventory stats for all periods. The smaller that “inventory” number, the better it is for sellers as there aren’t enough homes for buyers to pick and choose from.

 

 

 

So, class, what does this tell us? We’ll need to dig a bit farther back to see where we *should* be today as last May was our second month into all this craziness so it’s not a good data point. Let’s dig back another year to May 2019, which seems like eons ago

Now we have a trend. We’ve sat at 13 closings in May for the past 3 years, however, the number of people searching for homes has increased since 2019. But no more homes to pick from! In 2019 35 homes in Briar Chapel hit the market in May. This year it was 6. That squeezed inventory from 3.8 months (a healthy seller’s market) to just a couple of weeks, a frenzied seller’s market. As you’ve heard from your friends, homes can’t stay on the market long enough, from a month and a half to just four days on average. Great for sellers but they could end up suffering on the buyer side of things if their agent isn’t working overtime for them.