As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Twin Cities housing market will start to look better now that the weekly comparables will be looking back to last year at this time when the tax credit had expired.  As expected, pending home sales look quite good this week according to the latest weekly Twin Cities housing report from the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors.

To quote the report:

The 889 purchase agreements signed in the Twin Cities for the week ending May 21 were 40.2 percent higher than the same week in 2010.  That’s a big number, and it’s certainly good news, but let’s break it down. Three short weeks ago, current sales activity was 37.4 percent below last year’s levels. The truth is current sales levels have been slowly but steadily increasing all year. The sudden change from negative to positive year-over-year Pending Sales comparisons reflects sharply declining 2010 post-tax credit activity rather than skyrocketing 2011 activity.  Even so, double-digit year-over-year gains are a welcome sight. The change in seller activity was less dramatic. New Listings were up 7.9 percent with 1,706 new homes introduced to the market.  This is the third consecutive week of year-over-year gains in listings, yet the three-month average shows a 19.7 percent decline compared to last year.  At 23,767, Active Listings for Sale are 10.0 percent lower than last year at this time.

This week was filled with lots of doom and gloom with the Case-Shiller report showing that housing might be going in to a double dip.  The fact of the matter is the rise we saw during the tax credit was artificial.  The housing market has continued to slide.  If you listened to the media, you’d think prices are crashing.  For most of the market, that is not the case…it continues to be a gradual decline for most areas.

The association also published the April 2011 monthly report for the Twin Cities housing market.  This data isn’t quite as volatile as the weekly report noted above.