These 40 housing markets have seen the biggest inventory spike over the past year

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Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 20 months.

Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic levels have, generally speaking, experienced resilient home price growth over the past 20 months. While most housing markets still fall into the latter camp with inventory below pre-pandemic levels, inventory on a national level is up +15.7% year-over-year. And in some markets, it’s rising fairly fast.

For today’s letter, we pulled over some analysis from the Lance Lambert Inventory Tracker (a feature for ResiClub PRO members) to find the 40 major housing markets where inventory is up the most on a year-over-year basis.

Click here to view a searchable chart showing inventory shift in America’s 300 largest metro area housing markets

Big takeaway: Southwest Florida is cooling the fastest.

Over the past year, inventory is up…

+149% in Punta Gorda, FL

+103% in Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL

+81% in North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL

+62% in Naples-Marco Island, FL

Since December 2022, I’ve been noting on Twitter that Southwest Florida (SWFL) has been softening.

What’s going on?

Not only have these Southwest Florida housing markets seen affordability strained by the Pandemic Housing Boom run up in home prices and subsequent mortgage rate shock, but also an acute home insurance shock. And markets like Cape Coral and Fort Myers were impacted by Hurricane Ian that hit in September 2022.

This inventory run up suggests that more home price weakness awaits Southwest Florida.

Later this week, ResiClub PRO will do a deep dive on Florida housing markets. We’ll present ZIP code level home price and inventory data for every Florida ZIP code.

On Tuesday, we learned that U.S. home prices, as measured by the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, fell -0.4% between November and December.

For the full year 2023, existing national single-family home prices rose by +5.5% last year.

That was enough to put national home prices at the end of 2023 just slightly (+0.8%) above the 2022 peak hit in June 2022.