Archive for 'Info for Buyers' Category

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Twin Cities Sales Strong, Listings Soft

21 July 2008

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!While I’m probably the most techie REALTOR in my office, I still like something that is decidedly low-tech, our office’s Listings & Sales Boards.  These white boards, which “back in the day” were chalk boards, give a one-line description of [...]

Loose Lending Broke Housing, Tight Lending Keeps it Broken

20 June 2008

The several years of “loose lending” by mortgage lenders helped bring a surge of bad loan programs with borrowers that were either overextended from Day One or should have been unqualified to begin with.  This surge has now become a tsunami of foreclosures and short sales, which Jeff Allen and I have lumped together as [...]

Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS Monthly Video Update

16 June 2008

Take a look at some great commentary by MAAR.  The numbers are clearly showing a peak of inventory and a bottom for buyer demand, so we see “strength” in numbers that are no longer continuing to soften.  This market has a long way to go before we’re back to “normal” but it all has to [...]

May 2008 Twin Cities Market Stats

12 June 2008

MAAR has released their new market stats for the month of May and I’m trying a new idea: I’ve added commentary to the report expressing what I believe are the important “take aways” from the data.  I would love to get feedback both on the concept and your thoughts of my opinion.
Minneapolis/St. Paul Real Estate [...]

Minneapolis/St. Paul MLS Addresses Foreclosures & Short Sales… Kinda

10 June 2008

The RMLS of Minnesota, which is the governing body of the MLS in the Twin Cities and is owned by the 4 local REALTOR associations, has made some policy changes in regards to the reporting of foreclosures on the MLS, effective on Thursday:

The “In Foreclosure/Lender Owned?” field:

Initially will be an agent-only field (not available on [...]

Great Article on Future ARM Resets for Loans

5 June 2008

Great article talking about how ARM mortgage resets happening right now are not so bad but that there’s still a lot of ARMs out there in future years that might have a problem.  I’ve heard quite a bit of this before but this is a pretty good summary of it all.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/closer-look-at-arms-reset-problem.html

Here comes statistics in a video

2 June 2008

Jeff Allen @ the Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS, my good pal after the months of working on the Lender Mediated Sales Report together, has started what looks to become a once-a-month summary video of the highlights from the MAAR reports.  Granted the info discussed is all the positive stuff, but hey, that’s what a good marketing campaign is [...]

Twin Cities Housing Inventory Down vs. Last Year

19 May 2008

Since early this year, the Twin Cities housing market has been making strong gains towards a level of what I call “peak inventory.” What I’m describing as peak inventory is the point where we see the number of houses for sale today at a level lower than last year. Well, we officially hit [...]

Short Sales & Foreclosures in Plymouth and Maple Grove

19 May 2008

I took a few hours Sunday to review short sale and foreclosure sales in Plymouth and Maple Grove during the last 10 months and found some interesting information.  Before I explain what I found, I want to explain what I looked at:

Homes that were clearly a short sale OR a foreclosed, bank owned home.  This [...]

Price Per Square Foot - Lender-Mediated vs Traditional Sellers

6 May 2008

As a follow-up to the report I co-authored with Jeff Allen from MAAR, below is a comparison of price per finished square foot between lender-mediated sales and traditional sales.

As can be seen by the chart above, there is a substantial price discount on a cost per square foot basis when you look at lender mediated [...]


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