Inventory is one of the most useful signals for reading a market, and it only means something when you read it locally, seasonally, and against a balanced baseline. The national trend can be rising while your specific city, or one neighborhood inside it, moves the opposite way. We see this constantly: one county's active listings climb year over year while a beach town a few miles away has fewer homes for sale than it did a year earlier. Three habits keep the number honest: - Compare year over year, same season. Listings typically build through spring and summer and pull back heading into fall and winter, so month-to-month swings are mostly seasonal noise. - Measure against a balanced baseline. The raw count matters less than how it stacks up against your area's pre-2020 norm; plenty of markets can post big percentage gains in listings and still sit well below the supply a genuinely balanced market needs. - Pair the count with months of supply, which tells you how fast the standing inventory would sell at the current sales pace. To read your own market, ask a local agent for active listings versus the same month in prior years, the months-of-supply figure, and how both compare to the pre-2020 baseline. That combination tells you whether conditions favor buyers or sellers far better than any single headline number.