Minneapolis Duplex Market Something To Sing About

Mary Poppins said, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”  Since she was generally a pretty happy chick, I’ll go with her advice.

For the week ending September 4, 2010, 45.2 percent of the new duplex listings in the Minneapolis market were offered by traditional sellers. This is a healthy gain of market share over the 15.62 percent of sellers with human names for the same week last year.

The average off-market list price of $136,725 is well ahead of last year’s sold price of $122,187. Of course, the price a property is listed at isn’t usually the price it sells at these days.

Now for the medicine. Of the 16 duplexes and small multi-family properties that received acceptable purchase agreements, just 6.25 percent, or 1, was offered by a traditional seller. Last year, 20.7 percent of the 29 that pended did not involve a lender in the negotiations.

There was some sugar in the single-family home market as well. The number of new listings was down 12.8 percent compared to last year at the same time. However, there were more properties that came on the market Labor Day week than had the week before.

Pending sales didn’t experience as much of a decline but are nonetheless trailing last year’s by 35.9 percent.

Maybe if we all learn to spell supercalifragilisticexpealidocious, things will get better.