Real Estate. Economics. Business
There are now 71 distress properties for sale in Plymouth this morning. A distress property is a bank foreclosure, short sale, as-is sale, etc.  This is a slight increase from what we have typically been seeing.  There are 521 properties for sale so the distress sale percentage is 13.6%. If you’d like to see the list, please call or e-mail me.
Prices range from $59,900 to $699,900.
Calculated Risk has an excellent post complete with pretty charts showing national housing starts along with the builders’ confidence levels which have collapsed.
We are much closer to a bottom than we have been in 3 years.
BTW, in Hennepin County, there are 36 brand new homes, townhomes, condos for sale in the MLS that are distress sales. It does seem like the builders here in the Twin Cities have worked very hard to get their inventory down so that they aren’t in a distress sale situation. If you’d like the list, send me an e-mail.
Nearly 1/3 of all real estate transactions in the 3rd quarter were distress sales. The Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors calls these lender mediated sales.
The challenge for many buyers today is that about 2/3rds of all distress sales are not easily identifiable when reviewing properties online. The best way to get access to these properties is to subscribe to a customized service like the one I offer. (Click here to subscribe).
Alex Stenback publishes an excellent blog on the mortgage and real estate industries. While lending has become tighter, it’s not as tight as many in the media and housing consumers believe. Be sure to read his excellent post on the matter.
The Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors just published this week’s report on sales activity. The report runs through October 11, 2008 and shows that pending sales activity was up 21.1% compared to the same week last year. This continues a healthy trend that we have seen for the past 2 months. (This corroborates the report I did just for Hennepin County last week where pending sales activity actually accelerated during the first 2 weeks of October while the global financial markets crashed).
While it’s still too early to tell if these pending sales gains will hold but I will be watching this closely.
Below is this week’s notes from the Realtors:
Home sales continued their recent upward streak for the week ending October 11, with pending sales posting a 21.1 percent increase over the same week in 2007. While this doesn’t keep pace with the extreme increases seen throughout September, it remains a positive indicator of recent buyer demand. Almost half of the properties bought during the week in question were lender-mediated foreclosures or short sales—47.3 percent, to be exact.
On the supply side, things look decidedly different. New listings declined by 10.0 percent for the same time period comparison and are down 11.5 percent over the last three months. The total supply of active homes for sale sits at 30,495, which is 9.4 percent below this time last year. Inventory should decline through the remainder of the year as traditional home sellers take their homes off the market with greater frequency during the fall and winter months, waiting for the inherent optimism and renewed spirit of spring’s thaw.
