Another Sign of the Coming Housing Recovery

The above from Calculated Risk shows that existing home inventories are way down from 12 months ago and basically back to where they were in mid-2005 before we were slumping. That obviously doesn’t mean that we’re primed for a return to full boom levels of residential investment and construction employment, but it does mean that we should be primed for a return to something like long-term average levels of residential investment and construction employment. For the past few years we’ve been seeing historically low levels of these things, so even a very meh 2012 would involve a lot of growth and take a meaningful bite out of joblessness.