Video Video

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark.  Thanks so much for watching my blog.  The December numbers have come in for the unit sales for the whole year, and so I’m going to give you a little bit of information that you can look at, although there will be a lot more in the coming months.  For 2010, we ended the year with total units of 37,500, which is about a 16% decline from 2009.  The average sales price though in the Twin Cities did increase this year from 199,000 at the end of last year to 211,000 or a 5.9% increase.  That looks like a very positive influence on the market.  Now as I show you these following graphs, I think this will give you some more basics in the breakdown of the market. 

The first one is the inventory of homes for sale in the marketplace.  And what you’ll see here is that in 2009 there were 19,000 properties for sale at the end of last year and currently, there are 22,000 for sale today.  The next graph that you’re going to see is the total homes sold in 2010.  In the year of 2009, we had 46,000, and this year it ended with 37,000.  You’ll also see on the graph the breakdown for the single-family homes, the townhouse, and the condominium.  The third graph will show you the home sales breakdown by the price range so that you can see the first chart is 120,000 and below.

The next chart is from 150 and all the way up to the million-dollar price range.  And in each area, you’ll find that in the lower ranges it seems that there have been less sales in the lower ranges and a little bit more sales in the higher ranges, though not significantly.  And the last chart we’re going to look at is showing the housing supply going into 2011, that in fact right now in the lower price range we have about a 7-month supply and going up to a million dollars there’s over a 22-month supply.  This is a positive goal even in the upper ranges because you’ll see that the number of supply units have dropped and we hope for a better market coming into 2011.

We finished the year off over the last eight months with about a 30 to 40% decline in sales because of no tax credit.  And so as we move into the next year, you probably will not have the same amount of sales that we had in 2010 at the beginning of the year.  But it’s a great time for buyers to be purchasing because there’s a great inventory; interest rates remain great at about 4.75 to 5%.  Thanks for watching this video this week and have a good day.