Thursday, March 08, 2007

Houston, we have a problem. A million of them.














Notice something? The national home inventory spiked over a million. Inventory growth was already on that path, but it just cossed the mark on March 8th, 2007 (I noticed at 4pm PST). Yes, this only cut about two and a half weeks (18 days, to be precise) over when it was trendlining to break a million...

But what caused the spike? ziprealty error? New areas in Ziprealty? Panic and Mehem? (I doubt the last... but wait for it. That will eventually come.)

The red dot is my predicted maximum inventory for the year (previously blogged). It hasn't changed much. (Any good regression shouldn't be effected much by one data point.) Actually, it was a little down... we're still in the 1.3 to 1.4 million target range.

Edit:
Some grammer and noted ziprealty, at 8pm, is at 1.01 million homes for sale nationally! So this wasn't a one minute fluke...

Got popcorn?
Neil

4 comments:

TJandTheBear said...

Neil,

Good post -- short and sweet!

BTW, there's an idea I had a while back that I believe could up the traffic at your site considerably: post "real-time" counter of housing inventory (going up!) and another "real-time" dollar value of homeowner's equity (going down!). Of course, both would have to be running guesstimates based on existing trends... but hey, isn't that how they do all those others (e.g., debt, deficit, population, smoking deaths, etc.)?

I know it would be a great hook!

wannabuy said...

TJ

Great idea... now to figure out how to do it and periodically "reset it."

Now for some new news...

Airlines are usually an indicator of current economic health (sans weather delays).

"But there are signs that demand is weakening. Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and AirTran Airways all posted declines in February load factors." Southwest was weak too...

I'm convinced we're already in a recession.

http://news.airwise.com/story/view/1173216570.html

TJandTheBear said...

'bout time!

refractedthought said...

The relist-ening has begun.