Written by VIBE Owner/Broker Steve Anderson
Things are heating up! As we enter the spring season, we look closely at the numbers because we need to know if there will ever be an end in sight to this crazy, imbalanced market. If you're out looking at houses, you likely know just how intense the multiple offer situations have been. Will it even out anytime soon? Let's see what March can tell us on the subject.
Diving right in, we'll look at the Average Sales Price, and wow...we are now approaching almost $400k for the average - that's right - the average sales price in the Twin Cities. The official number is $382k. Just to give you an idea of how important that is, last year at this exact same time, the average sale price was $297k, and THAT was the highest it had been in over ten years. Maybe these next numbers will give us an idea on why it's gone up so much.
Days on Market comes in at the lowest number we've seen yet, just eleven days. Keep in mind that takes into account all of the homes in the Twin Cities, so even with price points that typically take longer to sell, we are still almost in the single digit territory. In more competitive price ranges (sub $500k), the average days on market is considerably lower.
The Total Homes for Sale is also the lowest we have on record now, at only 4,200 listings, and the Months Supply of Inventory has now been below one month for nearly five months in a row. All of this is adding up to extreme situations, but we may be heading in a better direction when we look at the New Listings graph. March had over 1,500 more new listings than February, and while that's not as high as we'd really like to see, it is at least a sign of more homes becoming available.
This spring will be very important to set the tone for the rest of the year in the Twin Cities real estate market. Bottom line is, there's just simply not enough homes for buyers in general. With it being like this for a while now, maybe sellers will start to see that it's a great time to cash in on the equity they have built in their homes. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for next month's recap. Happy buying and selling!
