The market, July
Which categories get acquisition money this month — and in each one, is it sellers we are short of or buyers?
Hands-on · Put July’s $12,000 where you think it goes. Only the supply-short rows take a figure: funding a category short of buyers makes it worse, so those rows have no field and say why. Kept for this browser tab.
How a category is read
- 1Sell-through is sold over listed in the same month — never sold over live listings, which improves every time a stale listing is deleted.
- 2A category is short of sellers when it sells over 60% of what it lists and more than one search in six still comes back empty.
- 3A category is short of buyers when the median listing takes over 45 days and fewer than one search in twelve comes back empty.
- 4Under thirty listings or a thousand searches, nothing is read at all. Every ratio at that size is noise.
- 5Gross value never picks a category. The biggest category is always the biggest, in every market, every month.
Neither figure means anything alone. High sell-through with no search pressure is a small category that happens to clear, not a hot one — brick is exactly that, and it is funded nothing.
Why sell-through is measured this way
The obvious denominator is live listings, and it is the one that made this business believe hardware was healthy for two years. Four hundred and two hardware listings are live; a hundred and four sold. Against live listings that reads as a twenty-six percent month, which sounds bad but survivable. Against the listings actually created in the month it is forty-three percent, and the useful figure is neither — it is that the backlog is running at nearly four months.
Any denominator that shrinks when you delete old listings is a denominator that rewards tidying up. This one does not move.
What a supply-short category actually costs
Beams sold forty-three of forty-six listings in six days, and eight hundred and twelve people searched for beams and were shown nothing. Those are not eight hundred lost sales — most of them were the same few dozen builders searching repeatedly, which is itself the signal.
What it means is that the ceiling on this category is not demand and not price. It is that six demolition firms decide, on a Tuesday, whether a load of oak goes on a lorry to us or into a skip. Everything on the sellers screen is about that Tuesday.
Every category · ranked by the size of the gap, not by value
| Category | Supply · sold of listed | Demand · searches with nothing | Backlog | Value | Reads as | This month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structural timber and beams22 sellers · 8 live | 93% · 43 of 46 · 6 d to sell | 27% · 812 of 3,010 | 0.2months | $96,400 | Short of sellersSells almost everything listed and still turns buyers away empty. Money spent finding sellers here converts. | 812 empty searches · 22 sellers |
| Reclaimed flooring29 sellers · 19 live | 89% · 55 of 62 · 11 d to sell | 22% · 596 of 2,760 | 0.3months | $78,300 | Short of sellersSells almost everything listed and still turns buyers away empty. Money spent finding sellers here converts. | 596 empty searches · 29 sellers |
| Slate and clay roofing11 sellers · 4 live | 93% · 25 of 27 · 7 d to sell | 33% · 470 of 1,440 | 0.2months | $52,100 | Short of sellersSells almost everything listed and still turns buyers away empty. Money spent finding sellers here converts. | 470 empty searches · 11 sellers |
| Door and window hardware88 sellers · 402 live | 43% · 104 of 240 · 47 d to sell | 5% · 52 of 1,010 | 3.9months | $8,900 | Short of buyersListings sit, and almost nobody is searching for them. More supply makes this worse, not better. | More supply makes this worse |
| Sash windows and frames51 sellers · 288 live | 29% · 34 of 118 · 61 d to sell | 4% · 41 of 940 | 8.5months | $14,900 | Short of buyersListings sit, and almost nobody is searching for them. More supply makes this worse, not better. | More supply makes this worse |
| Cut stone and sills14 sellers · 6 live | 90% · 28 of 31 · 8 d to sell | 28% · 226 of 810 | 0.2months | $33,700 | Short of sellersSells almost everything listed and still turns buyers away empty. Money spent finding sellers here converts. | 226 empty searches · 14 sellers |
| Sinks, tubs and sanitaryware43 sellers · 176 live | 41% · 39 of 94 · 52 d to sell | 5% · 34 of 620 | 4.5months | $16,200 | Short of buyersListings sit, and almost nobody is searching for them. More supply makes this worse, not better. | More supply makes this worse |
| Brick and pavers38 sellers · 26 live | 85% · 71 of 84 · 9 d to sell | 13% · 280 of 2,140 | 0.4months | $41,800 | ClearingBoth sides roughly meet. Nothing to fund and nothing to fix — which is the answer for most of a market most of the time. | Both sides meet. Nothing to fund |
| Interior doors74 sellers · 341 live | 45% · 96 of 212 · 38 d to sell | 5% · 96 of 1,880 | 3.6months | $22,600 | ClearingBoth sides roughly meet. Nothing to fund and nothing to fix — which is the answer for most of a market most of the time. | Both sides meet. Nothing to fund |
| Lighting and fixtures66 sellers · 214 live | 50% · 88 of 176 · 27 d to sell | 7% · 88 of 1,320 | 2.4months | $19,400 | ClearingBoth sides roughly meet. Nothing to fund and nothing to fix — which is the answer for most of a market most of the time. | Both sides meet. Nothing to fund |
| Cast railings and gates12 sellers · 34 live | 50% · 9 of 18 · 51 d to sell | 18% · 118 of 640 | 3.8months | $6,300 | Too small to readUnder thirty listings or a thousand searches. Every ratio here is noise and none of them may be quoted. | Too small to read — every ratio here is noise |
July’s seller-acquisition budget
$0 of $12,000 · $12,000 unallocated
Cast railings sits at the bottom with an 18 percent empty-search rate that would put it third on this list if anybody quoted it. Eighteen listings and six hundred and forty searches is not a market, and the diagnosis says so instead of flattering it — a hundred and eighteen empty searches is a rounding error and a reason to look again in three months, not a category to fund.