Housing market shift: 9 states where buyers are quickly gaining power

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When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings could suggest a market that is heating up.

Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has returned to pre-pandemic levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 30 months. Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic levels have, generally speaking, experienced stronger home price growth over the past 30 months.

How is inventory shaping up in 2025? As ResiClub communicated to ResiClub PRO members in late 2023—and reaffirmed last fall—we expect national active inventory to approach pre-pandemic 2019 levels in the second half of 2025. That’s still the trajectory we’re on.

National active listings are on the rise (+30.6% between April 2024 and April 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some sellers’ markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyers’ markets.

Nationally, we’re still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-15.6% below April 2019), and some resale markets, in particular big chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight to tight-ish.

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

• April 2017: 1,198,424 📉
• April 2018: 1,102,064 📉
• April 2019: 1,137,198 📈
• April 2020: 941,733 📉
• April 2021: 435,663 📉 (overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom)
• April 2022: 379,978 📉 (overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom)
• April 2023: 562,966 📈 
• April 2024: 734,318 📈
• April 2025: 959,251 📈

If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+224,933 homes for sale), we’d have:

• 1,184,184 active inventory come April 2026
• 1,409,117 active inventory come April 2027

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

While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight.

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 likely where home sellers this spring will have more power.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Gulf region, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin. These areas saw major price surges during the pandemic housing boom, with home prices getting stretched compared with local incomes. As pandemic-driven migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Tampa, Florida, and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices. This softening trend is further compounded by an abundance of new home supply in the Sun Belt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives to maintain sales, 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.

At the end of April 2025, nine states are above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia—which we left out of this analysis—is also back above pre-pandemic active inventory levels. Weakness 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 in some areas around the Gulf, most regional housing markets are still seeing positive year-over-year home price growth. The big question going forward is whether active inventory and months of supply will continue to rise and cause more housing markets to see price softening?

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

If you’d like to further examine the monthly state inventory figures, use the interactive below. (To better understand ongoing softness and weakness across Florida, read this ResiClub PRO report.)

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