Minneapolis Duplex Sales A Matter Of Perception

Four doesn’t seem like a lot of Minneapolis duplexes, triplexes or small multi-family properties, does it?

But that’s exactly how much pended sales for the week ending April 16, 2011 went up over the same week last year.

Of course, when you view this as a percentage, perceptions change. Four more duplexes represents a 16.7 percent increase in pending sales.

Of these, 41.7 percent were brought to the market by equity, or traditional sellers. The balance involved lenders in the negotiations.

Sure, that means duplex short sales and foreclosures are still dominating the Minneapolis and St Paul markets. However, during the same week last year, just 20 percent of the pended sales didn’t involve bank negotiations.

So traditional sellers doubled their share of the market. And this helped boost the average off-market price to $133,734. This is well above last year’s sold price of $103,553 for the week. Even when these transactions close, it is likely the average price will still outpace that of the week for 2010.

Traditional sellers brought 42.2 percent of the new listings to the market for the week, this is down just .6 percent from their contributions to the market in 2010.

It’s interesting to note, however, that there were 18 fewer new listings for the week this year. That translates to 28.6 percent fewer new properties on the market for buyers to choose from.

This trend holds in the single-family home market, where new listings for the week were down 21.5 percent from the same week in 2010.

In all, there are 15.4 percent fewer homes on the market for buyers to choose from than a year ago.

Of course, this year’s absence of a first-time home buyer’s tax credit also resulted in 18.6 percent fewer purchase agreements signed for the week.

As the tax credit expired April 30, 2010, we should start to get a more accurate measure of the Twin Cities single-family and duplex markets in the coming months.