New Housing Starts Pop The most prominent (bullish) article on the housing market to date? The headline (above) in today’s Star Tribune, covering the 13-county Twin Cities metro area. For context, the seasonally adjusted rate of 872,000 units reflects an 83% increase from the 2009 recession low, but is still well under the 2007 peak of...Read More
Bare Cupboards, or “Yes, We Have No Bananas” The big story in the Twin Cities housing market this year — besides infinitesimal interest rates and firming if not rising prices in many neighborhoods — is the lean inventory (hmm . . . do you suppose there’s a connection amongst all those things?). Metro-wide, listings are at...Read More
Real Estate Legal Trivia That question is HUGE in residential real estate, for a number of reasons. The three biggest: One. The “Final Acceptance Date” — when the deal’s officially a deal — starts the clock running on the Buyer’s Inspection Contingency (Buyers typically have 3-5 business days to inspect, once the ink on the deal is...Read More
Peaks, Troughs, and (September) Stubs Detect any patterns in the chart above? Here’s what I see: –Twin Cities new listings predictably peak each Spring, in late April/early May; –New listings reach their cyclical low each December; –Since the housing market top around 2006, both the new listing peaks and troughs have been successively lower, with one notable...Read More
Thick — and Thin-Skinned — Buyers First, two disclaimers: 1) in a decade selling real estate, I’ve never had a Buyer or Seller I represented bring — or defend — a legal action or arbitration claim; and 2) lawsuits (or arbitration actions) over “home sales gone bad” aren’t very common to begin with (I’d estimate that...Read More
Stealth Factor: ‘% of Original List Price Received’ “Sellers received an average of 95% of their list price, up 3.6% from July, 2011 and well above the 88.3% seen in early 2011.” –“The Skinny“; August 10, 2012 While everyone focuses on “headline” gauges of home prices — indices compiled by Case-Shiller, MAAR, etc. — they’re...Read More
