http://www.TwinCitiesUSA.com/video/Twin-Cities-Real-Estate-Overview-From-10000-ft

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark.  Thanks again for watching my weekly video blog.  This week, I’m going to break this into a two-week series, and it’s a series built upon this report that comes out once a year in the Twin Cities called “The Twin Cities Housing Annual Report for 2010.”  For this week, I want to kind of give you an overview of what’s gone on in the Twin Cities marketplace since 1980.  So that’s been over 30 years of what’s going on in transactions, sales, listings, and average sale price.

As you look on this sheet that you’ll be able to see online, you will see that in 1980 that the average sales price in the Twin Cities was $74,000.  And in fact, for about 25 years, we did not have an average sale price decline except for one year in 1988.  Now in the last 2000s, starting at around 2007, we began to see the decline in the average sale price because of the housing bubble that burst.  Part of it had to do with the mortgage lending fraud that was going on in the marketplace and then the sheer difficulties of our real estate marketplace.

A couple of things that you would want to look at if you like getting into statistics is following the number of listings that are on the market compared to the number of sales that are there.  So if you go to more recent years, for instance in the 2004 year, you’ll see that there were 97,000 listings that were on the market and 58,000 sales.  And so, almost 60% of the homes that were being listed were being sold.  What changed in the marketplace is then if you go down to the next couple of years where you look in 2006, and we had 108,000 listings and only 47,000 properties sold, which was down in the 40 percentile area for sales happening.

And that’s where you see oversupply with underdemand.  And that’s what we’ve been going through in this historical review when you follow the marketplace.  Now what you’ll see when you look in 2010 is that in fact we’re at 82,000 with 37,000 sales.  We’re still slightly under the 50%, but the sooner we can get to 60% of our properties selling that are going on the market, the more we’re going to be back to a real estate market.  So our marketplace historically has gone through smaller supplies, then larger supplies.  And now we’re moving back to a little bit shorter supplies.

So we look forward to next week as I get into the very specifics of what’s happened in the 2006 through 2010 real estate market.  Thanks for listening this week.  Have a great day.

 

 

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