Dear Minneapolis and St Paul Duplex Sellers…

Dear Duplex Sellers,

We miss you.

ALL of you; whether you’re a bank, upside down on your duplex, or a traditional seller with equity in your property.

We know you’re out there, somewhere. You’re just not in the process of actively selling, even though the market right now is terrific.

Think I’m making it up?

Right now, metro-wide, there are just 318 duplexes, triplexes and four unit properties for sale.

Of these, 113 already have offers and are in the process of either getting a short sale approval or in an inspection period.

On the Mineapolis side of 35W, there are 95 properties available. On the St Paul side there are 183.

Meanwhile, there are rumoured to be as many as 6 million single family, duplex, triplex and fourplex owners nationwide who are at least 30 days late on their mortgage payment.

What this means to traditional sellers is this moment, right now, is yours. At some point in time, the banks will have to actively foreclose on delinquent property owners. And when they do, seller competition will go up and values may go down.

For the week ending March 10, there were 32 Minneapolis and St Paul duplex sellers who accepted purchase agreements for their properties. Of these, 37.5 percent were sellers with equity in their properties. This market share was equal to last year’s, when six of the sixteen properties that sold were offered by traditional sellers.

However, it’s interesting to note the average sold price for the week in 2011 was $99,105. The average off-market list price for the same week this year was $159,430. As always, we’ll have to wait until those sales close to know how we truly fared.

There were 31 new listings for the week. Savvy traditional duplex sellers recognized their opportunity and contributed 51.6 percent of the new inventory. Last year during the same week, equity sellers contributed 40.7 percent of the 27 new duplex listings.

The single family home market continued to see decreases in the number of new listings, dropping .3 percent for the week. Meanwhile, pending sales were up 20.9 percent. This decreased the total amount of inventory on the market by 24.3 percent.

We miss you, Minneapolis duplex sellers.

Please write back.