http://www.TwinCitiesUSA.com/video/Market-Update-5-11mov

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark.  Thanks again for watching my weekly video blog.  Well, this week, I’m going to give you an update on what’s going on in the real estate market in the Twin Cities with the statistics that just came out for April.  Now as you’ve probably been following recently in the headlines, it’s been talking a lot about what’s gone on in sale prices.  So I’m going to show you this chart here that shows the graphs of the median sale price.  And you’ll see that the median sale prices year to date for 2011 is $144,000.

If you go back to 2010, we had a slightly higher price of $165,000, and in 2009, we had a price that was lower at $155,000.  You’ll also see below another graph that just shows what’s the historical median sale price for the Twin Cities.  So we peaked out in the early 2006-2007 around $240,000, and currently, we’re about at the $144,000 mark.  So you may wonder well, what is really going on in prices.  Partially what’s happening in prices is that we’re seeing that about 50% of the sales over the last four to six months has been in the lender-mediated area.

So as bad as this sounds, part of it is built upon the lender-mediated sales.  The next thing I want to show you is the area that’s called the pending sales chart.  As you can see from the pending sales, it’s significantly different this year compared to last year when there was a tax credit and that when we come out with our June statistics, you’re going to see us become much more normal where we’re off by about 20% in the last three months of sales because there wasn’t a tax credit.

The last chart I’m going to show you is what’s going on in the listing area.  We in fact even though there’s more listings coming on the market, you’ll see that our listing inventory is also less than last year by about 9%.  So we have a couple of good things going on in our marketplace.  We’re going to see a more balanced market coming on in May and June and July, and we have less properties that are on the market, which will begin to firm up our pricing.

Interest rates remain great.  They’re in the 4% level.  And you’ll also find affordability of housing because of where prices are at a great time to be out in the market purchasing.  Have a great day.  Thanks for watching.