Comment
This morning the National Association of Realtors reported its June index of purchase agreements for existing homes was down 19 percent from the same month one year ago.
The two regions leading the plunge in pending sales was lead by a 12 percent drop in the Northeast and a 9.5 percent dip in the Midwest.
As if to prove the data, the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors reported pending sales for the week ending July 24 were down 37.8 percent compared to last year.
The number of acting listings, meanwhile, is up 5.4 percent.
Duplex sales seemed to follow suit. The number of pended sales for the week was down 21 percent compared to last year, while the number of new listings rose 28 percent.
Of those duplex homes that received and accepted purchase agreements, just 13.04 percent involved a traditional seller in the negotiations. Last year, 31 percent of the pended sales involved people with names, not banks.
With fewer humans involved in the selling, this year’s average off-market price for the week dropped to $117,674; trailing last year’s average sold mark by a whopping $46,671.
Maybe it’s time to call Sen. Johnny Isaakson and ask for another $8000 tax credit.
Comment
Ever have a panic attack?
You know– the one’s where you can’t breathe or think?
I had one when I compiled the market statistics for Minneapolis and St Paul duplex sales for the week ending June 26, 2010.
A paltry 12 duplexes received purchase agreements. Twelve. Out of 723 active small multi-family listings in the Twin Cities metro area.
That’s down 37.5 percent from one year ago.
How did I get the color back in my face?
By finding the good news.
Traditional sellers accounted for 33 percent of the week’s duplex sales. Last year, they were just 9 percent of the market.
The average price the dozen left the active duplex market at was $180,808. Last year, the sold average for the week was $113,138.
And, while there were 42 new listings this year, that’s down from last year’s 57. Fifty percent of the new listings will not require a bank to be involved in any negotiations of a purchase agreement. Last year, just 22.8 percent were that hassle-free.
The single family housing market had 47.6 percent fewer pending sales for the week, with 6.5 percent fewer new listings than the year before.
With decreasing demand and growing inventory, it’s no surprise that the 27,526 homes presently on the market is 3.2 percent more than last year. There are now 7.44 homes available for every buyer actively in the market.
I think I need to go meditate.
Comment
It’s easy to blame a long holiday weekend for many things: weight gain, too much shopping, and, even, perhaps, a case of sagging Minneapolis duplex sales.
Pending sales for the week ending November 28 dropped 27.5 percent from their mark for the week one year ago.
This slowing in transactions also resulted in a slightly lower average off market price of $117,776, compared with last year’s sold price of $120,363. The good news is traditional sellers accounted for 20 percent of the properties that left the active roster this year, compared with just 13.79 percent one year ago.
Another encouraging sign is the trickle of new inventory coming on the market.
New listings for the week dropped 52 percent, meaning there are increasingly fewer properties for buyers to choose from. Of this new inventory, 38 percent was offered by traditional sellers. This represents a radical shift from last year, when 91 percent of the properties new to the market were lender owned or mediated.
The holiday season distracts nearly everyone, so it’s unlikely we’ll be able to glean any sort of real market knowledge until the new year.
Comment
Clients often ask me what a neighborhood is like.
I would love to answer. But I can’t.
Federal and state fair housing laws prohibit Realtors from commenting on any sort of demographic information, whether it’s factual or perceptual.
Further regulations prohibit Realtors from engaging in anything that could resemble “steering”, which is a practice of directing a client toward or away from a property in any sort of discriminatory manor.
So, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, can’t I just give clients my opinion?
Nope.
Not that I don’t have plenty of them.
But I try to base my opinions on facts, and when it comes to things like crime statistics and addresses of registered sex offenders, I don’t have them.
The police do.
And believe it or not, if you ask them their opinion of a given neighborhood or street, they will tell you. In fact, in the case of both Minneapolis and St Paul, the latest crime statistics are posted on their web sites. If you’d like even more up-to-the-minute data, you can call and ask for the SAFE officer in the neighborhood police precinct.
If you look at the maps or call, you might be surprised.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment
While the warm days of summer may have yet to arrive in the Twin Cities, the real estate market looks as if it might be time to break out the sun screen.
New listings and pending single family home sales jumped the week ending June 6. Newly signed purchase agreements were up 33.4 percent over the same week last year. And while new listings were up from their Memorial Day mark, they were still down 4.3 percent from the same stretch last year.
Almost every statistic in the single family home market points toward sunnier days. The Months Supply of Inventory has dropped to 7.6 months, and there the Supply/Demand Ration has dropped to five houses on the market for every buyer.
What’s more, the number of traditional home sales (properties owned by people, not banks) was up to 57 percent of all transactions in the month of May. In January of this year, only 40.6 percent of the single family homes sold did not involve a financial institution in the negotiations.
The duplex market also shone brightly for the week. For only the third time in the last year, the average off market price of pended properties was higher, at $125,939, than last year’s average of $115,123. While 89.3 percent of last year’s sales were lender mediated, the mark for the first week of June in 2009 was down slightly to 88.6 percent.
In other sunny news, the number of new listings coming on to the market for the week dropped 21.2 percent. While 67.7 percent of last year’s new inventory was bank owned, 58.7 percent of this year’s promise to involve a lender in negotiations.
After a long, rainy winter, it’s good to feel the warmth of the sun again; even if the forecast promises more rain.
Comment
We set a record the week ending the March 7, 2009.
But I don’t think it’s one we want a trophy for.
One-hundred percent of the 44 duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes that received purchase agreements in the Twin Cities metro area were either lender owned or mediated.
We know then what happened to the average off-market price, right?
It plummeted to $62,394; down 27 percent from the average price over the same stretch of time in 2008.
Now before we go looking for some anabolic steroids with which to improve the market’s performance, there is also more encouraging news.
The total number of small multi-family properties that pended week over week was up 209 percent. New inventory was down 33 percent. And, of the new market offerings, 83 percent were bank mediated. This was also a decline from the previous year, when 96 percent were involved lender negotiations.
According to MAAR, the single family Minneapolis and St Paul housing team fared better. Pending sales were up 24.7 percent over the same time last year, with 56.6 percent of these involving lenders mediations.
Supply continued to tighten meanwhile, with the number of new listings down 12.6 percent, bringing the total number of active lisitngs for the year down 14.9 percent from last year.
With the warming weather, first time home buyers and investors should be able to log more outdoor miles and help improve performance.
Comment
While the Minneapolis/St Paul real estate market may have spent much of 2008 in the doldrums, the duplex market finished the year with a small bounce in its step.
In the week ending January 3, 2009, 31 multi-family properties received purchase agreements. Ninety-seven percent of these transactions were lender mediated, with an average off market price of just $88,500.
With the exception of price, these figures represent significant gains over the same stretch bridging the transition between 2007 and 2008. Just 12 properties sold then, with 92 percent of those involving lender mediation. However, the average sales price was $153,590.
New duplex inventory continues to lag well behind the marks set 12 months ago, with 42 properties entering the marketplace to start the New Year, as opposed to 54 in the first week of 2008.
This trend holds in the single family market as well. Listings were down, while pending sales rose nearly 40 percent over the same week just one year before.
It is also worth noting that in December, the average number of Days on Market Until Sale dropped 6.3 percent from last December’s mark. Prices have yet to reflect any tightening of the market, however, with the Percent of Original List Price Received at Sale dropping to 90 percent; 1.3 percent lower than last year.
While these trends are encouraging, it’s probably too soon to herald a full-on recovery.
Comment
There’s a lot of hope in the air today. And it isn’t limited to the voting booth.
And today,
MAAR reports that for the week ending October 25, pending sales were up 17.1 percent over the same week last year. New listings, meanwhile, were down 2 percent. While this is certainly encouraging news, it should also be noted that 51.1 percent of the pending sales were foreclosures or short sales, which should result in continued declines in sales prices.
In the small multi-family housing sector, the number of new listings was identical to last year’s mark, with exactly 61 new properties to choose from.
However, there was no comparison between 2007 and 2008 in terms of sales volume. Last year’s weekly mark featured just 9 units sold, at an average sales price of $178,600.
This year, 49 metro listings received purchase agreements for the week; an increase over last year’s mark of 544 percent. This year’s pending list price, however, was $104,439; a decline of 41.5 percent in value.
Comment
Holy cow Batman! The banks are taking a beating!
This morning, MAAR released its weekly sales report for the week ending October 11. Get this: of all the pending home sales posted in the metro that week, 47.3 percent, or almost half of them, involved a lender-mediated foreclosure or short sale.
The good news? Pending sales blew up – logging a 21.1 percent increase over the same week last year.
But that’s nothing. Duplex and small multi-family housing sales for the same October period flat out exploded; rising a staggering 428.57 percent over the same week last year.
Aren’t we in a financial crisis? Wasn’t the stock market tumbling last week? Perhaps investors saw opportunities in real estate. They should have. The average sale price for a duplex during the first full week of October last year was $192,067. For the same time this year? It’s $95,649.
How many of those sales involved banks? In 2008 a full 93 percent of them. Last year’s equivalent week represented 85.7 percent lender-mediated transactions.
Isn’t there a lot of inventory on the market? Well, the number of single family properties that came on the market were down 11.5 percent over those that became available at the same time last year. New multi-family property listings, on the other hand, were down a full 20 percent year over year.
I can’t imagine prices at this time next year will drop by half again. Can they?
Comment
The Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors released its weekly Market Activity Report last night. And once again, there are encouraging signs in the Twin Cities single family home market.
The inventory of available single family homes is down 5.5 percent from the same time last year. There are presently 32,978 homes available on the market, which is about 2000 less than there were at this time last year.
MAAR attributes this decline to a 16.5 percent drop of new listings, as well as an increase of newly signed purchase agreements (pending sales) of 5.1 percent for the same year-over-year comparison.
These numbers create yet another promising barometer. The present Supply-Demand Ration indicates 8.68 homes for sale per buyer. This is a decrease of 4.2 percent over last year. A balanced market is one with an average of 5 homes available for every buyer active in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, the small multi-family market continues its salmon-like behavior, running upstream compared with the rest of the market. Newly signed purchase agreements for the week ending July 25 were up 410% over the same time last year (41 in 2008 to 10 in 2007).
While 40 percent of last year’s transactions involved a bank owned or short sale property, this year’s figure reflected 90 percent lender-involved activity.
It’s too soon to predict anything. We’ll continue to wait and see.
