Archive for 'Opinion' Category
Jim Cramer Says Buy a House - Soon!
23 July 2008If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Excerpted from: http://www.cnbc.com/id/25818021
Jim: I thought you were of the opinion that banks could not bottom before housing bottomed. What changed? –Dana in Florida
Cramer says: “We saw quarters from Wells Fargo from US Bancorp. We saw a quarter from JPMorgan. [...]
Twin Cities Sales Strong, Listings Soft
21 July 2008While 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 each of our new listings and sales for the month, including the name of the agent [...]
Loose Lending Broke Housing, Tight Lending Keeps it Broken
20 June 2008The 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 [...]
May 2008 Twin Cities Market Stats
12 June 2008MAAR 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 2008The 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 [...]
Twin Cities Housing Inventory Down vs. Last Year
19 May 2008Since 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 2008I 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 [...]
Q&A - How Long Should it Take to Sell My Home?
9 May 2008According to the RMLS’s analysis of the 13 county Twin Cities metro area, the average home is selling in 165 days. But also according to the RMLS, that home is only selling for 91.7% of original list price.
Now I’m not 100% sure on this, but my feeling is that most sellers would prefer to sell [...]
Price Per Square Foot - Lender-Mediated vs Traditional Sellers
6 May 2008As 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 [...]
Aaron Dickinson and MAAR Publish Report on Foreclosures and Short Sales on Twin Cities MLS
6 May 2008You can find the report here.
Background
In late October I wrote a blog post regarding foreclosures and short sales listed on the MLS in the Twin Cities. Once I started researching this topic, I found that the information I was uncovering was previously unknown in our market and that the trends it offered were very insightful. [...]