Episode summary
Will housing inventory drop in 2026?
HousingWire Daily
· · Hosts: Sarah Wheeler · Guests: Logan Mohtashami
Summary
Logan Mohtashami says the early 2026 housing data is holding up better than he expected, even after a major snowstorm hit much of the country. Weekly pending sales stayed positive, purchase applications were still up 18% year over year, and he argued that demand is strong enough to slow the pace of inventory growth even if inventory briefly turns negative year over year.
He framed the current market as a healthier version of the last few years: mortgage rates near 6% are enough to keep buyers engaged, while inventory and new listings are still up from a year ago and price-cut percentages have turned negative year over year. Logan Mohtashami said that if existing home sales rise above 4.71 million, that would signal a more normal level of demand, but for now he sees only a bounce from a very low base rather than a housing boom.
He also argued that the bigger risk to rates is not politics alone but the broader economy and labor data. Unless mortgage rates break materially below 5.75%, he does not see a sharp acceleration in demand, though he thinks the market can still support rising sales, rising inventory, and rising prices at the same time.
Key takeaways
- Logan Mohtashami said weekly pending sales and purchase applications stayed positive despite the snowstorm, suggesting demand entered February stronger than expected.
- He said inventory could print negative year over year for a few weeks because 2025 comps were unusually strong, not because the market has turned unhealthy.
- Mohtashami said existing home sales above 4.71 million would mark a return to more normal demand levels.
- He argued that mortgage rates near 6% are enough to keep the market active, but rates below 5.75% would change his outlook materially.
- He said the first-week January tracker was “very happy” news because it confirmed a healthier supply-demand balance going into spring.
Notable quotes
“the topic is are we going to have some weeks this year that our tracker data has negative year-over-year inventory”
“the weekly pending sales were still positive”
“the spring demand is is going well and again we're near 6%”
“If I saw existing home sales get above 4.71 million, then we're back to kind of what we saw in the last decade”
“so for now, the month of January, the tracker looked good”
How the episode opens
Welcome everyone. My guest today is lead analyst Logan Moto Shami to talk about inventory and housing demand. As always, I want to thank our sponsor Trust and Will for making this episode possible. Logan, welcome back to the podcast.
It is wonderful to be here. I'm in uh Houston, Texas, about to speak at an event in a few hours. So, uh I'm dressed in uh the events colors for today. — Yes. Very dapper today as per usual. Okay. Well, so what a weird week because we don't have jobs report again. Just when you got it back, now it's gone again.
Yes. I was we were going to do a jobs week preview today, but because of the shutdown that things have been delayed. We do have some, you know, ADP and some private sector labor reports we can go off of, but kind of the big ones, job openings and the BLS jobs Friday report um are the things that really drive uh Fed policy.
So, uh we're going to have to wait for that, but uh we had a weekend tracker that was um kind of stunned me to a degree and uh we're in February, so we're getting ready for spring. So, I think the the topic is are we going to have some weeks this year that our tracker data has negative year-over-year inventory?
That is that is so uh interesting. Okay. So, what was it about the tracker data that stunned you?
Well, we have a huge snowstorm and our weekly data is very prone to being hit by either a holiday or some kind of weather impacted uh uh event. However, you know, the weekly pending sales were still positive. I mean, I I could say that, you know, it could have been more positive, but I was ex uh anticipating uh a decline in the weekly uh uh uh pending sales data.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- housing inventory
- housing demand
- 2026 housing market
- mortgage rates
- real estate trends
Watch the episode
Watch “Will housing inventory drop in 2026?” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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