Weekly Twin Cities Real Estate Market Activity Report

A note: my personal schedule has been very hectic over the past few weeks, anecdotal evidence as it may be it nonetheless may serve as an optimistic counterpoint to the consistent (although indisputable) Market Reports I reprint here from the Minneapolis Association of Realtors.

I mention this not only as a way of explaining (apologizing) for my lack of posts and the innovative content you have come to expect from A Realtor you can Relate to but also as a way of of saying to the Sellers: "There will be brighter days ahead."

In the coming days I hope to bring you more content and strategies that Buyers AND Sellers can use to navigate the current market.

Make no mistake, gentle reader, There Will Be More Run-On Sentences!

In the meantime here is

...the latest from MAAR:

Vamoosh! Home sellers in the Twin Cities are continuing their great disappearing act, with new listings on the market in 2008 sitting far below last year's rate. Over the last three months, there have been almost 2,500 fewer listings put on the market than there were a year ago—a drop of 9.5 percent.

Inventory is still more plentiful than ever. Despite the pullback, we still have a record high number of houses on the market for this time of year. So what's the takeaway here? Well, if we look closer, we can see that the inventory gap between now and one year ago is closing, and closing hard. We've gone from being up 12.6 percent from a year ago to only 5.5 percent up in the last 12 weeks.

Gut check: We must keep perspective on the challenging environment that sellers still face, despite the softening competition. The number of signed purchase agreements (pending sales) for the last three months is 17.7 percent behind the same period a year ago. There's fewer of everything.