After a good amount of sales during the spring and summer, housing inventory may drop in the fall.
David Charron of The Washington Post writes that the expected inventory won’t meet buyer demand. In the Washington, D.C., metro area, “buyer activity was so strong during the spring and summer that we are entering the fall with a 16 percent lower volume of inventory compared to last year.” Charron notes.
Almost 13,000 homes were for sale in the Washington area in September of 2015, compared to just over 10,000 in August this year.
While that is better than those very lean years when we saw the number of active listings decrease to about 6,000, it still suggests the likelihood of a slowdown in activity while buyers wait for more homes to come on the market next spring. All this activity earlier in the year means that so far in 2016, the total volume of homes sold is 7 percent higher than the same time last year for the Washington region and 5.3 percent higher in the District.
