Need extra housing market tales from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub publication.
Throughout the pandemic housing growth, we noticed red-hot housing demand rapidly soak up a lot of the obtainable slack within the housing market. Again in 2021, lively housing stock on the market, unsold accomplished new builds, and obtainable lot provide all plunged to historic lows.
However ever for the reason that pandemic housing growth fizzled out in mid-2022, housing slack has been constructing again up within the housing market—particularly in sure pockets of the Solar Belt and Mountain West.
Look no additional than Zonda’s “New House Lot Provide Index,” which measures lot provide based mostly on the variety of single-family vacant developed heaps and the speed at which these heaps are absorbed by way of housing begins. The next index worth signifies a better provide of single-family vacant developed heaps, whereas a decrease index worth signifies a tighter lot provide/new building market.
That index in Q2 2025 climbed to 68.4—nicely above the all-time low of 35.8 set on the top of the pandemic housing growth in Q2 2022, when builders have been shopping for as a lot entitled land as they may discover.
“The timing of land and lot deliveries is a rising problem in at the moment’s housing market,” wrote Zonda chief economist Ali Wolf on August 12. “Whereas builders had deliberate to extend housing begins in 2025, they slowed manufacturing because the 12 months progressed resulting from uneven shopper demand and rising resale provide. This slower tempo of building contributed to the five-year excessive in Zonda’s Lot Provide Index, as fewer heaps have been transformed into begins.”
In response to Zonda, homebuilder lot provide loosened/rose in 22 of the 30 main metro-area housing markets tracked over the previous 12 months.
Housing markets like Tampa, Florida; Austin; Nashville; and Charlotte, North Carolina, skilled among the most vital year-over-year loosening of lot provide.
That stated, regardless of an uptick in obtainable heaps in some markets on a year-over-year foundation, most housing markets are nonetheless what Zonda considers “considerably undersupplied.”
Zonda’s New House Lot Provide Index has 5 groupings:
- “considerably oversupplied” = plus 125 rating
- “barely oversupplied” = 115 to 124 rating
- “appropriately equipped” = 85 to 114 rating
- “barely undersupplied” = 75 to 84 rating
- “considerably undersupplied” = beneath 75 rating
In response to Zonda, three main metro-area housing markets now are “appropriately equipped” for lot/land provide: Austin, Atlanta, and Dallas.
Observe: If Zonda had analyzed greater than 30 markets, the depend would doubtless have been larger than simply three—particularly in some softer pockets of Southwest Florida.
