Whoops! Minneapolis Duplex Sale Prices Drop
Shame on me. When I didn’t receive notice from MAR of the sales activity for the week ending December 13, I assumed they’d gone on vacation. Well, we all know what happens when we assume anything…Pending sales of single family homes were up 36.3 percent and new listings up 2.2 percent over the same week in 2007. Forty-eight percent of the new listings involve lender mediation, while 60 percent of the sales did.
The encroaching holidays did nothing to slow the small multi-family unit market, however. Fifty new listings came on the market, down 29.5 percent from last year. Of these, 78 percent involve mediation with a lender. This is up only slightly from the comparable week last year, when 73 percent of the new listings involved lenders.
While shrinking supply is sure to drive prices up in the future, such was not the case in this report. While the number of pending sales was up 186 percent, the average sale price dropped from $164,280 for the second week of December in 2007, to $96,810 for the comparable period in 2008.
The statistics for the week before Christmas are set to arrive tomorrow. It will be interesting to see if the number of new listings continues to drop.