Housing market inventory shift: 17 states where buyers are winning back power

Where is national active inventory headed?

National active listings are on the rise on a year-over-year basis (+15% from October 2024 to October 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some seller’s markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyer’s markets.

Nationally, we’re still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (9% below October 2019) and some resale markets, in particular chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight-ish.

While national active inventory is still up year over year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent months—more than typical seasonality would suggest—as some sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted in weak/soft markets.

October inventory/active listings* total, according to Realtor.com:

• October 2017 -> 1,287,322 📉
• October 2018 -> 1,304,682 📈
• October 2019 -> 1,208,311 📉
• October 2020 -> 734,040 📉
• October 2021 -> 565,707 📉 (overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom)
• October 2022 -> 752,741 📈
• October 2023 -> 738,082 📉
• October 2024 -> 953,814 📈
• October 2025 -> 1,100,001 📈

If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+146,187 homes for sale), we’d have 1,246,188 active inventory come October 2026.

Below is the year-over-year active inventory percentage change by state.

While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places too).

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 next spring are likely to have more power, relatively speaking.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sunbelt and Mountain West, including metro-area housing markets such as Punta Gorda, Florida, 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 Sunbelt. 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.

At the end of October 2025, 17 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia—which we left out of this analysis—is also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels. Softness in D.C. proper predates the current admin’s job cuts.)

Big picture: Over the past few years we’ve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the Pandemic Housing Boom. While home prices are falling some in pockets of the Sunbelt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets still eked out a little price appreciation this spring. Nationally aggregated home prices have been pretty close to flat in 2025.

Below is another version of the table above—but this one includes every month since January 2017.