17 States Beat Pre-Pandemic Inventory Levels — See the List

Buyers in 17 states now have more homes to choose from than they did before the pandemic ever started. As of the end of June 2026, active listings in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington all sit above where they stood in June 2019 — the last “normal” market before COVID scrambled every assumption about supply and demand. The District of Columbia cleared that bar too.

That’s the headline. The story underneath it is more interesting, and more useful if you’re actually trying to buy, sell, or relocate this year.

Key takeaways:

• Seventeen states — plus D.C. — now have more active listings than they did in June 2019, according to data compiled by ResiClub Analytics.
• Nationally, inventory is still running about 9.6% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels, even with the 17-state milestone.
• Year-over-year inventory growth has slowed to a crawl: +1.9% nationally between June 2025 and June 2026, down sharply from +28.9% the year before.
• Washington posted the fastest inventory growth among large states (+16% year-over-year), while Minnesota (+20%) and Virginia (+17%) led all states — even though neither has fully closed its gap to 2019 levels.
• The Midwest and Northeast remain the tightest markets in the country, and that’s exactly where sellers still hold the leverage.
• Florida, the epicenter of the post-boom correction, is showing signs the correction is losing steam rather than accelerating.

What “17 states above 2019 levels” actually measures

Before you read anything into this number, it helps to know exactly what’s being counted. Active listings — sometimes just called inventory — track every home currently for sale in a given month, not counting properties already under contract. It’s a snapshot, not a flow. A state can have thousands of homes change hands in a month and still show flat inventory if new listings replace the ones that sold at roughly the same pace.

Comparing today’s inventory to June 2019 matters because 2019 was the last stretch of anything resembling a normal market. Then came 2020 and 2021, when ultra-low mortgage rates and a remote-work migration wave pulled inventory down to levels nobody had seen in decades. Some metro areas lost more than 60% of their active listings within eighteen months. Sellers had all the leverage. Bidding wars were routine. Waived inspections were the price of admission in a lot of Sun Belt suburbs.

The last four years have been the slow unwind of that squeeze. Mortgage rates jumped, remote-work migration cooled, and builders — especially in the Sun Belt — kept pouring concrete even as buyer demand softened. The result: inventory has crept back up almost everywhere, just at wildly different speeds depending on the state.

Seventeen states crossing back over the 2019 line is the clearest sign yet of how far that unwind has come. But “crossing the line” doesn’t mean those markets are now identical to 2019. Prices are higher, populations have shifted, and the mix of what’s for sale — more new construction, fewer resales in some corridors — looks different than it did seven years ago.

How we got here: a short timeline from 2019 to now

It’s worth walking through the sequence, because the “17 states” milestone only makes sense in the context of how deep the pandemic-era inventory crash actually was.

2019. The baseline. A reasonably normal market nationally, with regional variation but nothing like the extremes that followed. Months of supply nationally hovered in balanced territory. Bidding wars happened in hot coastal metros, but they weren’t the default experience everywhere.

2020–2021. Mortgage rates fell below 3%, remote work untethered millions of buyers from their offices, and a wave of migration hit Sun Belt and Mountain West metros almost overnight. Active listings collapsed nationally — some metro areas lost well over half their for-sale inventory in under two years. Waived inspections, appraisal gap coverage, and offers tens of thousands over asking became routine in markets that had never seen that kind of competition before.

2022. Mortgage rates roughly doubled in the span of months as the Fed moved aggressively to fight inflation. Buyer demand cooled fast. But sellers, many sitting on mortgage rates two-thirds lower than the new market rate, mostly stopped listing rather than trade into a much more expensive loan. That’s the origin of the “lock-in effect” that’s still shaping the market today. Inventory stayed low even as demand fell, because supply fell right alongside it.

2023–2024. This is when the story splits by region. Sun Belt and Mountain West builders, who had ramped up land acquisition and construction during the boom, kept building — completed new-home inventory doesn’t care about the lock-in effect, since builders aren’t emotionally attached to a low mortgage rate on a house they’re trying to sell. Resale inventory in these fast-growing states started climbing too, slowly at first, then faster as some of the boom-era buyers who’d overextended began needing to sell. Meanwhile, in much of the Midwest and Northeast, where new construction never scaled up the way it did in the Sun Belt, inventory stayed structurally tight.

2025. The gap between Sun Belt supply growth and Midwest/Northeast tightness became impossible to ignore in the data. National year-over-year inventory growth peaked near +29% in mid-2025 — an enormous number reflecting just how much ground the Sun Belt states were making up. By October 2025, 17 states had already crossed above their 2019 baseline for the first time in this cycle.

Early 2026. Winter seasonality thinned inventory everywhere, and the count of states above the 2019 line dropped back to single digits — 9 states in both January and February. This is normal. Fewer people list homes in the dead of winter regardless of what the underlying trend is doing.

Spring into summer 2026. As listings picked back up seasonally, the count climbed again — 11 states by March, 12 by April, and 17 by the end of June. The year-over-year growth rate, though, kept decelerating the entire time, from +28.9% down to +1.9%. More states crossing the threshold, but at a much slower overall pace of supply growth than a year earlier. Both things are true at once, and that’s exactly what makes this data easy to misread if you only catch the headline number.

The full list: 17 states above pre-pandemic inventory

Here’s the complete roster of states where active listings, as of June 2026, exceed where they stood in June 2019, based on ResiClub Analytics’ monthly state inventory tracking.

State	Status vs. June 2019
Alabama	Above 2019 levels
Arizona	Above 2019 levels
Arkansas	Above 2019 levels
Colorado	Above 2019 levels
Florida	Above 2019 levels
Georgia	Above 2019 levels
Hawaii	Above 2019 levels
Idaho	Above 2019 levels
Nebraska	Above 2019 levels
North Carolina	Above 2019 levels
Oklahoma	Above 2019 levels
Oregon	Above 2019 levels
South Carolina	Above 2019 levels
Tennessee	Above 2019 levels
Texas	Above 2019 levels
Utah	Above 2019 levels
Washington	Above 2019 levels
District of Columbia	Above 2019 levels (not counted in the 17-state total)

Look at that list for a second and a pattern jumps out: it’s almost entirely Sun Belt and Mountain West geography, with a couple of Pacific Northwest and Plains states mixed in. Not one Northeast state made the cut. Not one Midwest state either, aside from Nebraska poking through as something of an outlier. That split isn’t random, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about where buyers have leverage right now and where they don’t.

This list also isn’t static. The count has moved around over the past year — it touched 17 back in October 2025, dropped to single digits by January and February 2026 as winter seasonality thinned out for-sale inventory, then climbed back through 11 states in March, 12 in April, and 17 again by June. Inventory has a seasonal heartbeat: it typically builds through spring and summer and contracts in winter. The June 2026 read is the freshest and the most representative of where things stand heading into the second half of the year.

Why the national number still looks weak

Here’s the part that trips people up. Seventeen states beating 2019 sounds like the housing shortage is basically solved. It isn’t — not at the national level, anyway.

Nationally, active inventory in June 2026 remained about 9.6% below where it sat in June 2019. That gap has narrowed steadily — it was 17.8% in January, 17.0% in February, 11.8% in April — but it’s still a real shortfall, and it’s concentrated almost entirely in states that didn’t make the list above.

The math is simple once you see it laid out: a handful of huge, still-tight markets (think New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, most of the Midwest corn belt) can drag the national average down even while 17 other states are running a surplus relative to 2019. National figures average across wildly different local realities, which is exactly why a median vs. average explanation matters before you take any national housing statistic at face value. The national number is a useful headline. It is a terrible guide to any specific market.

There’s a second, subtler reason the national trend looks soft: growth has decelerated hard even in the states doing the heavy lifting. Between June 2024 and June 2025, U.S. active inventory grew by roughly 242,528 homes. Between June 2025 and June 2026, it grew by just 20,095 homes — more than a 90% falloff in the pace of new supply hitting the market. Year-over-year growth went from +28.9% to +1.9% in the span of twelve months. The inventory recovery hasn’t reversed. It has stalled out at a much slower cruising speed.

Why the sudden brake? A few forces are pulling in opposite directions at once:

• Builders pulled back. After two years of aggressive spec-building in Sun Belt markets, homebuilders trimmed new starts and leaned on price cuts, rate buydowns, and incentives to move existing spec inventory instead of adding more of it.
• Some sellers pulled listings. In markets where prices softened, a share of would-be sellers decided to wait rather than sell into a buyer’s market.
• The lock-in effect is finally cracking, but slowly. Homeowners sitting on 3% mortgage rates have been reluctant to trade up into a 6%-plus rate for years. New listings have ticked higher than 2023 and 2024, but not dramatically — people are moving because they have to (job, family, downsizing), not because they want to chase a hot market.

None of that changes the top-line fact: 17 states have more homes for sale, relative to 2019, than they did a year ago. It just means the pace of that expansion has flattened out, and a national buyer’s-market narrative is misleading if you’re shopping in one of the states still stuck below 2019 supply.

The Sun Belt states carrying the recovery

If you had to pick one region responsible for the 17-state milestone, it’s the Sun Belt, and Florida sits at the center of the story more than any other state.

Florida has been the epicenter of the post-boom housing correction over the past two years, and nowhere more than Southwest Florida. Cape Coral, Fort Myers, and the surrounding Gulf Coast counties saw explosive price growth during the pandemic boom, then absorbed the sharpest inventory buildup and price softening once mortgage rates rose and insurance costs spiked. If you want the month-by-month version of that story, the Southwest Florida market update tracks the shift in real time, and the Fort Myers condo market outlook breaks down why condos in particular have taken the hardest hit on price.

Here’s the twist worth paying attention to: the intensity of Florida’s correction appears to be easing, not accelerating. The seasonal inventory jump that typically hits Florida each spring has been noticeably tame in 2026 compared with the past couple of years. That doesn’t mean prices are shooting back up — it means the state is no longer piling on new inventory at the breakneck pace that defined 2023 through 2025. Markets like Sarasota and the broader Jacksonville metro are seeing a similar pattern — inventory well above where it sat pre-pandemic, but the growth curve flattening rather than steepening. Jacksonville’s story is also tied to its underlying job market; the Jacksonville economic outlook is a useful companion read if you’re weighing a relocation there against the inventory picture.

Texas, Arizona, and Georgia tell a similar version of the same story. All three saw massive homebuilding activity from 2021 through 2024 as domestic migration poured into Sun Belt metros. That construction boom is exactly why these states cleared the 2019 inventory bar well before most of the country — new-construction supply doesn’t care what the resale market is doing. National new-home data backs this up: builder activity nationally has moderated from its 2023 peak, but the completed inventory built during the boom years is still working through the system. The national home builder numbers piece walks through how that construction pipeline maps onto today’s resale supply.

Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma round out the Sun Belt contingent. These are generally more affordable markets than the Florida coast or the big Texas metros, and that affordability cushion has kept the correction milder — inventory has grown, but without the sharp price declines seen in the priciest Florida and Arizona submarkets. It’s a useful reminder that “above 2019 inventory” doesn’t automatically mean “falling prices.” It means supply has normalized. What happens to price from there depends on local demand, job growth, and how much of that new supply is still trying to find a buyer.

Texas is worth a closer look on its own, because it’s really two or three different markets wearing one state name. Austin absorbed the sharpest correction in the state — heavy new construction met a slowdown in tech-driven migration, and prices in some Austin suburbs have given back a meaningful chunk of their pandemic-era gains. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston have seen inventory rise too, but more gradually, cushioned by more diversified job bases that never depended as heavily on a single migration wave. San Antonio has been the steadiest of the major Texas metros, with inventory growth tracking population growth reasonably closely rather than sharply outpacing it.

Georgia shows a milder version of the same pattern. Atlanta’s outer suburbs saw heavy building through the boom years, and that new supply is a big part of why Georgia cleared the 2019 threshold. But job growth around metro Atlanta’s logistics, film production, and corporate-relocation sectors has stayed strong enough that the state hasn’t seen anything like Austin’s price correction. More supply, still-solid demand — a genuinely balanced outcome rather than a distressed one.

New construction versus resale: two different inventory stories

One detail gets lost in most coverage of this data: active inventory lumps new construction and existing resale homes into a single number, but the two behave completely differently, and the mix matters as much as the total.

New-construction inventory is supply-driven. A builder decides to break ground based on land costs, financing, and a forecast of future demand — decisions made a year or more before the home ever hits the market. That means new-home supply can keep growing even after resale demand has cooled, simply because projects already underway have to finish and sell. This is a big part of why Sun Belt states cleared the 2019 threshold faster than anywhere else: the construction pipeline that started during the 2021–2022 boom kept delivering finished homes well into 2024 and 2025, regardless of what buyer demand was doing in the moment.

Resale inventory is a different animal entirely. It’s driven by homeowner decisions — job changes, family needs, downsizing, or simply deciding the time is right to sell — and those decisions are heavily influenced by the lock-in effect described above. A homeowner sitting on a 3% mortgage has a real financial incentive to stay put even if they’d otherwise consider moving. That’s why resale inventory nationally has recovered much more slowly than new-construction inventory, and why the Midwest and Northeast — regions with comparatively little new construction to fall back on — have stayed so tight.

The practical takeaway: if you’re shopping in one of the 17 states above 2019 levels, check whether the inventory surplus in your target area is concentrated in new construction, resale, or both. A market flush with new-build inventory but still tight on resale is a different negotiating environment than one where both segments have loosened. Builders are often more willing to negotiate on price, upgrades, or rate buydowns than an individual homeowner seller, simply because a builder’s incentive is moving through inventory on a balance sheet rather than an emotional decision about a family home.

The Mountain West and Pacific holdouts

Four states outside the traditional Sun Belt made the list, and each got there for a slightly different reason.

Washington posted the fastest inventory growth of any large state in the country — up 16% year-over-year through June 2026. That’s a striking number for a state that spent most of the 2010s as one of the tightest, most competitive markets in the nation, driven by Seattle-area tech wealth. Slower tech hiring, higher rates, and a stretch of new construction have all pushed inventory higher, to the point that at least one major national homebuilder has publicly acknowledged needing to make affordability adjustments to move spec inventory in its Washington and Oregon communities. Builders don’t usually admit that kind of thing unless the data forces their hand.

Oregon followed a similar script — new supply outpacing a demand pool that never fully recovered its pre-pandemic intensity, especially outside the Portland core.

Idaho and Utah are the Mountain West members of the club. Both states absorbed some of the heaviest pandemic-era migration relative to their size — Boise and the Wasatch Front became two of the most talked-about relocation destinations in the country between 2020 and 2022 — and both then saw a proportionally large supply response from builders. When a small state absorbs a large migration wave and an even larger construction response, it doesn’t take much slippage in demand to push inventory well past where it stood in 2019.

Hawaii and Nebraska are the outliers on this list, geographically and economically. Hawaii’s inventory story is driven more by high carrying costs (insurance, HOA fees, and a persistently expensive resale market) discouraging new listings from selling quickly, which mechanically inflates active inventory even without much new supply. Nebraska’s presence is a reminder that “above 2019” thresholds can be crossed in smaller, lower-volume states without the dramatic price corrections seen in the Sun Belt — a modest shift in absolute numbers moves the percentage more easily when the base is small.

Colorado deserves its own mention here, since it’s on the list and behaves a little differently than its Sun Belt neighbors. The Front Range corridor — Denver, Colorado Springs, and the foothills communities feeding into them — saw serious pandemic-era demand from both in-state and out-of-state buyers chasing mountain access and remote-work flexibility. Foothills towns like Pine absorbed a wave of buyers looking for exactly that combination. Colorado’s inventory recovery has been steadier and less dramatic than Florida’s boom-bust cycle, which is part of why the state hasn’t seen the kind of price corrections that have hit Southwest Florida or parts of Arizona.

Where sellers still have the edge — the Midwest and Northeast

For every state above the 2019 line, there’s a mirror image somewhere in the Midwest or Northeast still running meaningfully below it. This is the half of the story that national headlines tend to skip, and it’s the half that matters most if you’re comparing markets for a relocation.

The pattern is consistent across every data source tracking this: active resale and new-construction supply remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. Construction never ramped up the way it did in the Sun Belt — land is harder to assemble, zoning is more restrictive in a lot of older Northeast metros, and population growth in much of the Midwest has been flat to negative for years, which gives builders less reason to take the risk. Less new supply plus steady (or growing) demand in the metros that are growing means inventory stays tight.

Ohio is a good example of a Midwest state that hasn’t cracked the list despite genuine demand strength in specific metros. Columbus, Cincinnati, and parts of Cleveland have seen real population and job gains, and that demand is running into a supply base that never saw the aggressive building Sun Belt metros did. The hottest markets in Ohio rundown is worth a look if you’re weighing a Midwest relocation against a Sun Belt one — the trade-off is usually lower prices and tighter competition versus higher prices and more selection.

Industry data on buyer’s and seller’s markets backs up the regional split at the metro level. Recent analysis found that out of the 100 largest U.S. metros, more than half still favor sellers, with that group heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Meanwhile, most of the metros currently favoring buyers sit in Florida. Separate metro-level research defined a “buyer’s market” as one where sellers outnumber buyers by at least 10%, and found buyers held that kind of leverage in roughly three dozen metros nationally — while only a handful of metros, again concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, still qualified as seller’s markets by the same standard.

North Carolina is the interesting exception worth flagging, because it made the above-2019 list statewide even though specific coastal submarkets inside it behave very differently than the inland Piedmont region. The Outer Banks market, broken down town by town, shows a vacation-and-second-home market with its own supply dynamics, somewhat detached from the Charlotte and Raleigh corridors driving most of the state’s population growth. Statewide inventory figures can mask that kind of internal split, which is exactly why state-level data is a starting point for research, not a substitute for looking at the specific metro or county you’re actually considering.

What months of supply and buyer leverage mean in practice

“More inventory than 2019” is a useful headline, but the number that actually tells you whether you’re negotiating from strength or weakness is months of supply — how long it would take to sell every home currently listed at the current pace of sales.

The general framework, consistent across most brokerages and data providers: under three to four months of supply signals a seller’s market, four to six is roughly balanced, and above six clearly favors buyers. Nationally, months of supply sat around 4.6 in mid-2026 — solidly in balanced territory, tilting toward buyers, but not the blowout buyer’s market national headlines sometimes suggest.

That national average, again, hides enormous local variation. Some metros are running well under three months of supply and behaving like it’s 2021 all over again — multiple offers, waived contingencies, homes going pending in under a week. Others are sitting at eight, nine, ten months of supply, where price cuts are common and sellers are offering meaningful concessions just to get a contract signed.

Here’s a quick reference for how months of supply typically maps to market conditions — thresholds vary slightly by source, but the general bands hold up nationally:

Months of supply	What it typically signals
Under 3 months	Strong seller’s market — competitive offers, fast sales
3 to 4 months	Balanced-to-seller’s market, tilting toward sellers
4 to 6 months	Balanced market, roughly even leverage
Above 6 months	Buyer’s market — price cuts and concessions common

A worked example makes this concrete. Say a metro has 4,200 active listings and homes are selling at a pace of 700 per month. Divide 4,200 by 700 and you get six months of supply — right at the line where the market flips from balanced to buyer-favored. Now say that same metro’s inventory climbs to 5,600 listings while the sales pace holds steady at 700 a month: that’s eight months of supply, a clear buyer’s market where price cuts and concessions should be the expectation, not the exception. This is the exact calculation your agent should be able to run for your specific ZIP code or neighborhood — not just quote you the metro-wide average.

Two other numbers are worth checking alongside months of supply:

Days on market. The national median in 2026 climbed to around 64 days — the highest reading since 2018. But the spread between markets is enormous. Some Midwest metros are seeing more than a third of listings go pending inside a week. Meanwhile, homes in soft Florida submarkets have been sitting closer to 100 days on average. If a listing in your target market has been sitting well past the local median, that’s a signal worth asking your agent about directly — and it’s worth understanding what actually makes a listing “stale” before you assume a long time on market means something is wrong with the house itself. Often it just means the seller priced it for a market that no longer exists.

Sale-to-list ratio. This measures what buyers are actually paying relative to the original asking price. Above 100% signals a seller’s market (buyers bidding over ask); 98–100% is balanced; below that, buyers are routinely negotiating below list. Early 2026 data showed buyers paying close to 8% below original list price on average nationally — the largest gap since 2012. That’s real, usable leverage if you’re shopping in a market where it applies, and it’s a number worth asking your agent to pull for your specific ZIP code before you write an offer, not just the metro-wide figure.

Why some Sun Belt markets are seeing prices soften even as sales continue

Higher inventory and softer prices tend to travel together, but the relationship isn’t automatic, and it’s worth understanding why certain Sun Belt states are seeing real price pressure while others in the same “above 2019” club are holding value.

Insurance costs are doing a lot of the damage in Florida specifically. Years of hurricane losses, reinsurance market stress, and multiple insurer exits from the state have pushed premiums sharply higher across the coast, and that cost increase functions almost like a stealth rate hike — it raises the true monthly cost of owning a home regardless of what the mortgage rate is. The homeowners insurance outlook for 2026 and the Panhandle-specific breakdown of rising premiums both dig into how much of Florida’s inventory buildup traces back to buyers getting priced out at the insurance line item, not the mortgage rate line item. It’s a distinctly Florida (and, to a lesser extent, coastal Texas and Louisiana) problem — inland Sun Belt states without major hurricane exposure haven’t seen the same insurance-driven demand pullback.

Overbuilding in specific submarkets is the other major factor. Punta Gorda, several Austin-area suburbs, and pockets of Phoenix all saw home prices stretch well beyond what local incomes could support during the pandemic boom, backed by heavy new construction. When migration slowed and rates rose, those markets had both the most new supply and the least income cushion to absorb a slowdown — a combination that produces the sharpest corrections. States on this list that avoided that particular combination — steadier population growth, less speculative building, more affordable starting price points — have generally avoided the price declines even while inventory rose in step with everyone else.

If you’re evaluating an investment purchase anywhere in Florida right now, that distinction between “inventory recovering” and “prices actively falling” matters enormously, and it’s worth reading a full breakdown like the Florida real estate investing guide before assuming a soft market automatically means a buying opportunity. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it means the correction still has room to run.

What this means if you’re relocating and comparing markets

This is where the state-level data actually earns its keep for a normal household weighing a move, rather than just for economists tracking a trend line.

Start with the state-level snapshot, then zoom into the metro. A state showing up on the above-2019 list tells you the broad direction of travel — more supply, generally softer negotiating conditions for buyers. It does not tell you whether the specific neighborhood or metro you’re considering follows that pattern. North Carolina’s statewide numbers, as covered above, blend a booming Piedmont corridor with a very different coastal second-home market. Florida blends a soft Southwest Gulf Coast with tighter conditions in parts of the state that never saw the same speculative building. Always drill down to the county or metro level before drawing conclusions.

Compare the trade-off, not just the price tag. A market with tighter inventory (say, much of the Midwest or Northeast) usually means lower average prices but more competition for the good listings and less negotiating room. A market with looser inventory (most of the Sun Belt list above) usually means more selection and more leverage, but potentially higher carrying costs — insurance, HOA fees, property taxes — depending on the state. Buying vs. renting is the right lens to run that math through before committing to either side of that trade-off.

Use the affordability data, not just the inventory data, to narrow your target area. Within a single state, price points can swing enormously by submarket. Someone comparing Southwest Florida options, for instance, benefits from looking at something like the most affordable areas in Southwest Florida alongside pricier options like Marco Island versus Naples, or weighing Gulf Coast against Atlantic Coast Florida living entirely. The same exercise applies in any of the 17 states — the state-level inventory trend sets the stage, but the town-by-town or ZIP-by-ZIP numbers decide the outcome.

Factor in population and demand trends, not just current supply. A town-by-town population breakdown tells you where growth is concentrated within a region — useful context for whether today’s inventory surplus is likely to shrink again as more people move in, or whether it reflects a longer-term supply-demand mismatch that isn’t going away soon.

Don’t assume “more inventory” means “condos and starter homes are equally affected.” In several Florida coastal markets, condo inventory has piled up far faster than single-family inventory, driven by rising HOA assessments and post-Surfside safety-inspection requirements pushing owners to sell. Anyone shopping specifically in the condo segment — say, in Miami’s beachfront towers or a neighborhood like Coconut Grove — should treat the condo and single-family inventory numbers as two separate stories, even within the same city.

Negotiating room: what buyers can actually ask for right now

Higher inventory translates into real, usable leverage at the negotiating table, but only if buyers know what to ask for. Seller concessions have become far more common across the 17 states on this list than they were during the 2021 boom, when asking for anything beyond the list price felt like a good way to lose a bidding war.

The concessions showing up most often right now include seller-paid rate buydowns (a lump sum at closing that lowers the buyer’s effective mortgage rate for a period, or for the life of the loan), closing cost credits, repair credits in lieu of completing the work before closing, and home warranty coverage thrown in to sweeten a deal without cutting the headline price. A full rundown of the most common seller concessions being negotiated in 2026 is worth reading before you write an offer in any market where inventory has climbed — knowing what’s realistic to ask for is the difference between leaving money on the table and asking for something a seller will actually consider.

The strength of that leverage still depends entirely on local conditions. A buyer in a Midwest metro with under three months of supply asking for a 2% closing cost credit is probably going to get laughed out of a multiple-offer situation. The same ask in a Gulf Coast Florida submarket sitting at eight or nine months of supply is a completely reasonable opening position — and in some of those markets, sellers are offering concessions unprompted just to keep a buyer from walking.

A five-step checklist before you trust a state-level number

State-level inventory data is a genuinely useful starting point, but it’s easy to over-read. Before you make a decision based on the “17 states” headline, run through this quick checklist:

1. Pull the metro or county number, not just the state number. State figures blend fast-growing metros with declining rural counties, or booming coastal corridors with sleepy inland ones. Ask your agent for the specific area’s active listing count and trend.
2. Check months of supply for your specific price point and property type. A metro can be balanced overall while its condo segment behaves like a buyer’s market and its entry-level single-family segment stays tight. Averages hide this every time.
3. Look at days on market relative to the local median, not the national one. A 45-day listing is stale in a market where the median is 20 days, and perfectly normal in a market where the median is 60.
4. Ask what share of the inventory is new construction versus resale. The negotiating dynamics, and who you’re actually negotiating with, differ substantially between the two.
5. Factor in carrying costs, not just purchase price. Insurance, HOA fees, and property taxes vary enormously by state and can offset a lower list price faster than most buyers expect, especially in coastal Florida and parts of the Gulf Coast.

Running through these five checks takes an agent a few minutes and turns a national headline into an actual decision-ready number for your specific search.

Common questions about the 2026 state inventory data

Does more inventory mean home prices are falling?

Not automatically. Inventory measures supply; price is set by the interaction of supply and demand. Some states on the above-2019 list, like Florida and Arizona, have seen real price softening in specific submarkets. Others, like Colorado and the Carolinas, have seen inventory rise without comparable price declines, because demand has stayed relatively strong alongside the new supply.

Why isn’t my state on the list even though I’ve heard the market is “cooling” everywhere?

National headlines about a cooling market usually describe the direction of travel — inventory rising, price growth slowing — rather than an absolute comparison to 2019. A state can be “cooling” relative to its own recent peak while still sitting well below its 2019 inventory level. Most of the Midwest and Northeast fall into that category.

Is this the best time to buy in one of the 17 states?

It’s a better time to negotiate than it’s been in years in most of these markets, but “best time” depends on your own timeline, financing, and the specific submarket. A statewide inventory surplus doesn’t guarantee every neighborhood within that state offers the same leverage.

How often does this data update?

ResiClub Analytics publishes state-level inventory comparisons monthly, and the count of states above 2019 levels moves with the season — typically rising through spring and summer, then contracting again in winter as fewer homes get listed.

What’s driving Washington’s fast inventory growth if it’s not usually considered a Sun Belt-style boom market?

A combination of slower tech-sector hiring, higher mortgage rates cooling migration-driven demand, and a stretch of new construction that outpaced buyer absorption, especially outside the immediate Seattle core.

Should sellers in these 17 states be worried?

Not necessarily, but sellers in a market with rising months of supply should expect longer time on market and more negotiating pressure than they’d have faced in 2021 or 2022. Pricing accurately from day one matters more in a market with more competing listings.

Are condos and single-family homes affected equally?

No. In several Florida coastal markets in particular, condo inventory has climbed faster than single-family inventory, driven by rising HOA costs and post-Surfside inspection and reserve requirements pushing more owners to sell.

Does rising inventory always mean it’s a good time to sell?

Not by itself. Rising inventory generally means more competition from other sellers, which usually calls for sharper pricing and a stronger initial presentation rather than testing the market with an ambitious list price. Sellers in the 17 states above 2019 levels should expect to compete harder for buyer attention than sellers did in 2021 or 2022.

Will more states cross the 2019 threshold later in 2026?

Inventory typically peaks in late summer and early fall before contracting again for winter, so it’s plausible additional states could join the list before the year is out if the current trend holds. It’s equally possible the count pulls back some as winter approaches, the way it did between October 2025 and January 2026. The trend to watch is the underlying year-over-year growth rate, not just which side of the 2019 line a state sits on in any single month.

How does mortgage rate movement factor into all of this?

Mortgage rates affect both sides of the supply equation at once. Higher rates discourage locked-in homeowners from listing, which restrains supply, but they also cool buyer demand, which can leave more of what does get listed sitting unsold longer. A meaningful drop in rates would likely accelerate the resale-inventory unlock in tight Midwest and Northeast markets faster than it would move the Sun Belt states, which are already supply-heavy from new construction regardless of rate movement.

The bottom line for buyers, sellers, and anyone comparing markets

Seventeen states clearing their 2019 inventory bar is real progress toward a more balanced national market, even if the national number still lags behind it. What it means for you depends entirely on which side of that 17-state line your target market sits on — and, just as important, which specific metro or neighborhood inside that state you’re actually looking at.

If you’re shopping in one of the 17, you likely have more selection and more room to negotiate than buyers have had in years — but check the local months-of-supply and days-on-market figures before assuming the state-level trend applies to your specific search. If you’re shopping somewhere that hasn’t cracked the list, expect the Midwest and Northeast pattern: fewer options, faster sales, and less room to ask for concessions.

Either way, the state-level number is the headline. The metro-level number is the one that should actually shape your offer.