I had to just skim this to see what the heck I wrote, I'm not only so far past this in the writing, I'm working my butt off. I have three closings for May, and I'm trying to earn my paycheck for June now. I have seven hours worth of houses lined up to show a client tomorrow. I just hope half of them remain on the market long enough for my client to find one to put an offer in on.
Based upon national trends, the US has a shortage of 2.5 MILLION houses. Locally, just today, we had 68 new listings, and 17 that are back on the market (they were pending and the deal fell through). Again, just today, there were 84 that changed status to pending - meaning they had someone write an offer that was accepted, and another 84 changed status to sold, meaning they closed. 85 houses became available, and twice that left the market. One of the biggest factors pushing this is actually millennials moving out of the basement, and finally adulting.
This isn't just affecting home sales. New car sales are going gangbusters, too. Except they don't have any inventory to sell. I know guys that work at stores that normally sell 200 - 300 new cars each month that have less than a dozen on the lot. If you have a car you don't need, apparently Carvana is giving brain damage - and then because people are stupid and actually BUYING cars from them, they're paying thousands more than the car is actually worth. (Example - the car I'm leasing, the payoff is $22,900. It's realistically worth $25,500 for trade-in, with clean retail of $28,000. Carvana offered me $27,700 for it - which means they'd retail it for $31,000. Mind you, it was $35,000 MSRP brand new, and I signed paperwork on it at $32,000 because I was working at the dealership. Insanity!)