How fast a market eats its inventory: the single number behind 'buyer's' vs. 'seller's' market talk.
The inputs matter more than the formula: sales should be recorded closings (not pendings), inventory should exclude under-contract listings, and both should come from the same geography and period. Absorption computed on a county tells you little about a specific community — which is why our pages compute it at community grain from recorded MLS data.
Traditional rules of thumb call under ~4–5 months of supply a seller-leaning market and above ~6 buyer-leaning — useful shorthand, but the trend beats the level: a market moving from 3 to 5 months is loosening regardless of labels. Segment matters too: absorption at $300k and at $900k in the same ZIP are frequently different markets.
For sellers, absorption sets the realistic clock: price against the latest closed sales in a slow-absorption market and you sell; price against hope and you join the failure statistics — 201,552 Florida listings didn't sell in the 12 months we analyzed. Community-level absorption is on each home-value page alongside the closed-sale record.
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