Inventory Levels Are Back Above Pre-Pandemic Norms in 15 States

Nationwide active home listings are growing. Although active listings are still approximately 10% below inventory levels seen in 2019—prior to the pandemic housing boom—they grew by 17% from September 2024 to September 2025, according to the ResiClub blog.

Even so, the pace of growth has been slow to recover. In September 2019, active inventory reached 1.22 million listings, and by September 2021, that figure declined to just 578,070. As of September 2025, inventory levels reached 1.1 million listings. While inventory levels are still below levels seen in 2019, 15 states have seen inventory levels return to pre-pandemic norms. These states include: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. While not technically a state, Washington, D.C., has also seen active inventory return to pre-pandemic levels.

As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. That’s where home sellers this spring had, relatively speaking, more power.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sun Belt and Mountain West, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda and Austin. Many of these areas saw major price surges during the Pandemic Housing Boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Tampa and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices. This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new home supply in the Sun Belt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable deals. That puts additional upward pressure on resale inventory.