Well, that headline kind of sums it up. Here are the numbers.
Resale housing inventory increased in March by 6.5 percent from a month prior. Despite this fairly pronounced pop, inventory remained 3.5 percent below its level of one year prior.
Those who read the previous entry on the home price rally should be unsurprised to learn that sales activity also experienced a nice bounce, rising by 38.1 percent from February. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds, as sales volume always jumps big-time in March. It is, however, higher than the average February-to-March increase of 31.1 percent over the prior four years. Sales were up by 1.8 percent from March 2009.
The number of months’ worth of inventory, which divides inventory by monthly sales in order to measure how supply stacks up to demand, fell to 4.9 months. The accompanying graph shows that while this figure is slightly higher than it was for most of 2009, it is still the lowest March months-of-inventory reading in the four years since I started tracking this number. Inventory remains tight for now.
— RICH TOSCANO