Interactive: Stock-starved housing markets just can’t catch a break

Since the number of new homes bottomed out years ago, many local housing markets have seen a gradual influx of supply, which has helped rebalance conditions in favor of buyers.

Now that pace of recovery is slowing across the country — and may even be peaking in places where the stock recovery has been most pronounced.

But some markets where new listings have become harder to find in recent months already had severely depleted supply to begin with, leaving prospects for parity between buyers and sellers well out of reach, an Inman review of Realtor.com data suggests.

• The growth rate of the number of new listings decreased from 3.8 percent year-on-year in the three-month period ending October to 0.6 percent in the three months ending in January, as the market continued to stabilize.

Explore Inman Market View’s interactive data tools on this page to see how your market compares.

Click on one of the 500 local markets in the tool above, or look for an option in the drop-down menu for an even more detailed view of the data. Select different metrics and time period comparisons for a more complete picture.

Coast to coast

The interactive map above is significantly less blue than it was three months ago – especially in the West, the Northeast and several major population centers in the Midwest.

This means that some coastal communities, which once saw noticeable year-over-year increases in listings in the fall, peaked in the winter. And places where the number of new listings remained stable a few months ago are now losing ground.

For real estate professionals in these regions, the loss of new listings is particularly painful.

In the West and the Northeast, the supply of newly available homes never really recovered after the initial downturn as sellers sat out of the market.

In the Midwest and Northeast, as shown above, inventory has remained extremely tight in supply even as buyers stopped bidding on homes. This has kept markets such as the larger metros of Chicago, New York and Philadelphia from matching the national pace of recovery in active listings.

And it doesn’t look like that situation will improve any time soon, as these three cities, like many others across the country, are now seeing new listing growth rates slow.

In the Northeast, these conditions have largely helped support significant price growth, causing property owners and agents to endure a steep transaction decline.

But Chicago and some expensive West Coast markets were initially largely left out of the national housing boom. And even steep losses on new offerings haven’t pushed prices much higher.

But just because new listing growth is slowing in these metros doesn’t mean it’s happening everywhere.

You can use the charts above to search for your own market and compare its trajectory with others across a range of metrics and time comparisons.

The neighborhood view

In Chicago, 11 percent Fewer new offers came onto the market from November to January than in the same period the year before.

And it’s remarkable how widely this derailment was felt across the greater metropolitan area.

Most local housing markets are not in Chicago’s position. About half are still experiencing healthier listing levels than the year before and are experiencing growth and decline rates in central cities and suburbs.

But the new listing recovery that characterized the pandemic recovery rebalancing era is slowing in more and more places. Connect yours to the tool above for a deeper look.

Email Daniel Houston