Wisconsin housing inventory

By the numbers

Despite a slight recent uptick, Wisconsin’s housing inventory in October of this year was 64% lower than its value during the same month in 2016, data gathered by the National Association of Realtors show.

The series counts the number of active listings of single-family homes, condos or townhomes in a geographical unit during a given month. According to Realtor.com, the data are a “snapshot measure of how many active listings can be expected on any given day” of the month in question.

The active listing count is one indicator of the housing supply in a market or region. If inventory is high, it means that buyers have more choices available to them and may have more leverage to negotiate prices down. If inventory is low, buyers may bid against each other for fewer choices, which could move prices upward. Low inventory and high prices could also signal to developers that more housing supply is needed.

The Wisconsin data, which were made accessible by the Federal Reserve Economic Data portal, show a downward trend from mid-2017 through early 2023. Though the data is seasonal, with relative peaks in summer months and troughs in the winter, the series on average moved downward.

This is made clear by the series of year-over-year differences, which compare each month’s data to the corresponding value 12 months prior. From the middle of 2017 to the beginning of 2023, the year-over-year difference was negative, indicating that supply was steadily shrinking over time.

A major deviation from the trend occurred in 2020 during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic and government lockdowns. Rather than increasing during the spring and peaking in the summer months, supply continued to slip throughout the year. The supply continued to fall until the beginning months of 2021, when the normal seasonal cycle resumed at a lower level.

Housing inventory reached a critical point around mid-2023, where the trend in year-over-year differences crossed from negative territory into positive, indicating that housing inventory had begun increasing again. The winter low in February 2024 was larger than its value a year prior, and the most recent reading of 12,293 in October 2024 was nearly 18% higher than it was twelve months ago.

The underlying numbers