St Paul Duplex Market Balances Buyers And Sellers
While October’s unusually warm temperatures had us all believing in infinite summer, the St Paul duplex market definitely had a fall chill.
The market saw 87 active duplex, triplex and fourplex listings for the month. While that doesn’t seem like many, it was nonetheless, the highest total for October since 2017. Given we’ve had a severe shortage of inventory, that could be seen as good news.
Meanwhile, the 36 new listings during the month were about average for the month. Most of these came from the Payne-Phelan neighborhood with 7, followed closely by Merriam Park/Lexington-Hamline with 6.
Here’s the problem. Just 17 small multifamily properties traded hands in October; the least in a decade. Yes, in that 10 years there were other Octobers that came close, but this is the one that set the record. Those properties closed, on average, for $361,788, with owners receiving 96.6% of their original asking price.
The month’s high seller was a 9 bedroom, 4 bathroom 1981-built fourplex in the Summit-University neighborhood which closed at $808,000. A HUD-owned duplex house conversion with 5 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in the same neighborhood closed at $185,000. In fact, Summit-University lead the way with four of the 17 closed sales.
Properties spent an average of 56 days on the market before selling. The total market time was exactly the same for cumulative days on market.
St Paul currently has a 5 month supply of inventory. This means if no new listings came on the market from this point forward, at the current sales pace, it would take 5 months for us to run out of properties to buy. Most real estate experts view a 5 month supply as a balanced market. These usually don’t last very long and tip quickly toward either buyers or sellers. More than a 5 month supply is considered a buyer’s market; anything less a seller’s market.
Multifamily properties are not as affected by the seasons as those for single family homes. Don’t be surprised if things change again next month.