Inventory runs on a seasonal calendar first: listings build through spring, peak in mid-to-late summer, then taper into the holidays. The stretch after the Super Bowl usually kicks off the climb, and the pattern repeats every year regardless of the headlines. Anyone asking whether inventory will jump next month should first ask where we are in that calendar. The harder question is whether inventory rises in a durable way, and the math is trickier than the raw listing count suggests. When a seller lists and then buys another home, the listing and the purchase roughly offset; one household moves between price points without adding to overall supply. Real loosening happens only when homes pile up and sit instead of going straight under contract. Two forces keep that from happening: - Locked-in owners. Most owners are sitting on low rates and cheap payments, so they hold rather than sell into a higher-rate loan. - Few forced sales. The U.S. fixed-rate system produces very few of them. New construction helps at the margin, but publicly traded builders chase margin and tend to build larger homes rather than the entry-level supply that is actually short. We will not predict a direction or a date, because nobody can honestly promise where inventory goes. Watch your own metro's active-listing trend and days on market, which tell you far more than any national number.