Twin Cities Real Estate Blog

Minnesota Home Ownership Center does a great job of helping struggling homeowners determine and exercise their options.  Their blog post yesterday introduced me to a short article from Public Citizen that explains a large part of our problems in negotiating loan mods and short sales.

MAAR’s Foreclosure and Short Sale Report (FSS for short) has been updated for November 2009.  Since October we are now publishing this report MONTHLY and have broken out foreclosures, short sales and traditional sales separately.
There is a TON of information in here to see but some of the big items of note:

Foreclosure/REO new listings are [...]

Star Tribune has an article discussing how many houses in foreclosure sit in limbo between the owner that is losing it and the bank that is repossessing it.  There are a few things in the story that aren’t quite right but the gist is good.  Worth a read.  The comments from readers are just sad [...]

In the last few months we’ve seen a flurry of sales as first time buyers are trying to close on a home purchase before the $8000 tax credit expires on November 30th (maybe).
This has largely lead to the precipitous decline of available inventory on the under $190k and brought Months supply of homes in the [...]

The Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors has a fantastic assortment of stats that are published on weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly cycles.  These reports are based off the listing data provided by our local MLS, the Regional MLS of Minnesota.
As anyone who works with data knows, the statistics you create are only as good as [...]

A while back we released the 2nd Quarter Foreclosure (REO) & Short Sales Report, which not only debuted another revision to the methodology that decreased the counts of foreclosures and short sales significantly, but also showed positive trends in this market segment.  Good signs included:

New Lender Mediated listing activity has remained steady over the last [...]

Jim Cramer on Tuesday’s show stated that we’re at a housing market bottom nationally (article).  Below is the video of this segment.

While time will tell if Jim Cramer is right, on a local level I’m not ready to call a housing market bottom.  I do believe however that foreclosures have price-bottomed in our market. Unfortunately [...]