Weekly Special | March 15, 2021

Shadow Inventory Of Homes Is Gone

If you are a long-time reader of the Real Estate Weekly Special Report, then you might remember past reports we produced about the shadow inventory of homes for sale.

As a reminder, those were all the homes that had been on the market but failed to sell and had not yet be relisted.

We wrote about those homes because there was a glut of homes for sale on the market, yet we knew that were even more homes waiting to come back to the market.

Well, those days are over, the shadow inventory has been exhausted, and we have the opposite problem of too few homes available.

The graph above shows the stale listings coming back into the market each year in January and February. “Stale” listings are those that were recently listed with another broker and failed to sell. Now the sellers are returning to the market with a new broker.

The 69 stale listings entered in January and February 2021 measures as a whopping 75% fewer than the 276 stale listings entering the market in the first two months of 2015.

The shadow inventory never really goes away, but it’s as small as we’ve seen it since the market crash of 2006.

There will always be unrealistic sellers who try to get a price for their home that the market will not bear, but that group has been whittled down to the lowest number we’ve seen in more than 15 years.

You can read more current inventory conditions in Tallahassee HERE.

This issue went with a longer report on our blog: read the full blog post. The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.