Market Update

Weekly Market Activity Report

Remember how we've been saying that the Twin Cities housing market has been getting successively slower in home sales every week since the tax credit ended? Umm, yeah, well that's still happening.


Pending sales for the week ending June 5 were another 57.0 percent behind the pace seen a year ago, dropping from 1,226 in 2009 to 527 today. This is the fifth consecutive week-to-week drop in signed contracts. While activity is down across the board, lender-mediated foreclosures and short sales are slowly increasing their market share of sales because traditional home sales have declined sharply. During this week last year, 37.8 percent of pending sales were lender-mediated; this year the share is 43.3 percent.

Thankfully, new supply is not growing in lock-step. The 1,521 new homes placed on the market for the most recent reporting week were 29.6 percent less than last year at this time. This has helped keep the Months Supply of Inventory metric at 6.9 months, down 9.3 percent from May 2009.