Where is the housing inventory? Lack of housing inventory continues to plague real estate market.

Dr. Housing Bubble reports:

We are seeing a near record low in inventory. So you don’t need high sales volume right now to boost prices. All you need is a few willing buyers and the market is now into a very exuberant mood. There is a big disconnect of course. We’ve been adding more renter households instead of owner households over the last decade. Millennials are living at home in record numbers. People forget one major thing about the last housing bust: it wasn’t crappy mortgages that pushed people off the edge. It was the fact that people couldn’t pay their mortgages because incomes dried up. It should be noted that most of the foreclosures that happened went to traditional 30 year mortgages.

Once again we are in uncharted waters here. In the last bubble, we had record home sales, record home building, and record buying. This all actually makes sense from a “market” perspective. Today, what is happening doesn’t. What you have is acceptance that this is a rigged system. If prices are soaring, and inventory is tight, you would assume that builders would be out in force like last time. Yet builders don’t believe the market.

Check out the charts on this one.