http://www.TwinCitiesUSA.com/video/Annual-Report-Bmov

 Hi, this is Steve Westmark again, and this is the second in our series on the “Twin Cities Housing Annual Report for 2010.”  Today, what I want to share with you are some simple graphs that will show you what’s going on since 2006 in the Twin Cities marketplace.  The first graph that I’m going to show you is the closed sales graph.  That graph goes back in 2006 in showing we had 47,000 sales.  A continued drop until the 2009 year when we had a full year of tax credit.  And then we lost the tax credit for the last eight months of 2010, and you’ll see that the unit sales dropped.

The next graph that I want to show you is showing you where the median sale price was in the Twin Cities at the end of the year.  So in 2006, our median sale price, which half the sales were above 230,000 and half the sales were below 230,000.  And you’ll see that there’s been a slight decline until 2010 where we saw a slight increase, which I believe is showing that we’re at the bottom of our market and we’re coming and turning around, moving into a more positive marketplace.  The next graph is the average sale price.  And you’ll see that in 2006, it was at 278,000 and as you follow it to 2009, you’ll see the bottom price.  And then you’ll see quite an increase into 2011.

Now one of the things that I want to point about the 2010 is that in the last eight months of that year, there were fewer first-time homebuyers because of the first-time homebuyers tax credit.  The next graph that I’m going to show you is the graph that shows months supply at year end.  And you’ll see that we had a higher amount of 8.4 months in 2006 down to a low of 2.5 months in 2008.  And now we’re dealing with about a 7.5-month supply.

The next graph I want to show you is showing what’s going on in new construction, and this is the area that I believe is going to turn our marketplace around in the near future, and it hasn’t quite happened yet.  It shows that back in 2006, we were up at nearly 7,000 homes being built, and now we have an inventory of only about 2,000 new construction homes on the market.  Until we get our laborers, our electricians, our carpenters back to work with new construction, we won’t have the health in our Twin Cities real estate economy that we would like to see.

The last graph that I want to show you from this is where it’s in the area of talking about distressed home sales, and it shows where we’ve gone in our marketplace.  That in fact in 2006, there were only 3.5% of our marketplace were either bank owned or short sale type sales.  And we peaked in 2009 in the percentage of sales being at 43%.  2010 you’ll see that it’s dropped down to 39.9%.  So we’ve begun to see also the end of that, though it’s only a slight decline.  But we may continue to see that for the next year or two.

Well, thanks for watching this.  At the very end of this blog, you’ll be able to download this whole report from 2010 and print it out on your own computer.  Thanks so much for watching, and if you ever have any questions, please give me a call.  Thanks.