The Minneapolis Association of Realtors published this week’s report.  The news basically is that new listings inventory continues to drop.  This week’s new listings compared to the same week the year before is down a dramatic 23%.  Current inventory levels are down 4.1% overall compared to last year at this time.
Pending sales activity continues to show marked improvement compared to where we had been.  Frankly, I watch this number more than any of the others.  If buyers don’t have the appetite to write contracts, it’s not going to matter what happens with inventory.  We are starting to see buyers dip their toes back in to the market and we’ve seen pending activity improve for the past 4-5 weeks. As you’ll see the note below, this is the largest week over week increase in over 2 years!  For the past 18 months we have almost continuously seen comparative year over year (YOY) pending sales numbers down anywhere from 15-25%.  This pending sales activity is indeed welcome news to the market.

Sellers in the Twin Cities housing market continue to cut back on their output, while simultaneously we appear to have finally found the bottom for buyer activity. New listings for the week ending May 31 were a healthy 23.0 percent behind the same week in 2007, a drop of 522 units. For the same time period, pending sales increased by 4.9 percent over last year—the largest year-over-year increase in 117 weeks, and only the third recorded increase in that time. So even though home sales are still low by historical standards, they’re not falling any further for the time being.

Here’s this week’s report.