hff,
Please read back on this thread until early Spring and you will see what happened. The MLS made a change in the software which removed properties without sq ft listed from the statistics function. longtime followers of this thread understand that the number we see for inventory is off by those properties. You can see the drop down occur on the Artifacts graphs. With that said, the short sales are not intended to be the number of short sales in the market either but rather the number of times the words “short sale” appear in the MLS.

Whether the correct number is 19,000, 22,000 or even 25,000 is irrelevant here. What we are watching here is the change and the speed at which these two points are changing.

BTW, I love Artifacts new scaling of the data which put the short sale and inventory data in lock step for the last few months. It will make it much easier to identify the divergence of the two.