Business & Tech

Roseville Home Sales Up But Median Sales Price Down in 2011

Roseville's statistics follow the overall Twin Cities trend.

Following the overall trend of the Twin Cities region, Roseville's residential real estate market posted an increase in completed home sales in 2011 but its median home sale price tumbled. 

Roseville had 308 closed home sales in 2011, up from 281 completed sales in 2010, according to data from the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors (MAAR). 

But the city's median home sales price took one of its biggest drops in recent years, falling from $190,000 in 2010 to $158,800 in 2011, a 16.6 percent decline, according to MAAR and its St. Paul counterpart group.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

Roseville area real estate agents blamed the city's falling median home sales prices on short sales, those where homeowners have had to sell their houses for less than what they owed on their mortgages.

But with overall new home listings down in 2011 from the prior year, Edina Realty branch manager in Roseville, Lisa Meyer, said she expedts home prices will begin to stabilize this year.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

"We expect (new home) foreclosures to come slower on the market," Meyer added, citing another positive that should ease falling home prices in the midst of a presidential election year.

As a result, Meyer said she also believes that traditional sellers could see their home sales prices level out or slightly improve.

Rick Duffy, a real estate agent for Keller-Williams in Roseville, also said he sees hopeful signs in the market. "The market is stabilizing and finding its new base line," he said, noting that the inventory of available homes for sale is down from a year ago. "I think normalcy will be returning to the market."

Athough Duffy senses the Twin Cities housing market has survived the worst of the housing slump, he said it could take another five years before short sales and foreclosures are largely purged from the system. 

Meanwhile, Overall, the Twin Cities real estate forecast is still chilly, but there are at least a few rays of sunshine poking through the clouds.
In 2011, the median sales price of homes in the 13-county Twin Cities region fell to $150,000, down 11.7 percent from the already depressed levels of 2010. (The area’s median sales price peaked at $230,000 in 2006.)
Inventory, however, fell a dramatic 28.7 percent from 2010, and is now at the lowest level in eight years. The time it would take to sell off all active properties in the region—a standard measure of real estate inventory—has dropped 36.5 percent to 4.5 months.
Ordinarily, a big drop in inventory would lead almost immediately to rising home prices. But the region’s median price is still being held down by the flood of properties being sold through the foreclosure process or through short sales, said Richard Tucker, vice president of Coldwell Banker Burnet in Burnsville. .
Exactly half of all closed sales in 2011 were either foreclosures or short sales, and such “distressed properties” typically go for about 60 cents on the dollar compared to traditional homes.
The real estate market has witnessed a unique situation in the “past four or five years,” Tucker said.  At the beginning of the downturn, “we were at very high inventory levels. … the economic crisis forced all that to go down.
“The last piece of (the) recovery will be (an improvement in the) average sales price,” triggered by a scarcity of supply, Tucker said. “That’s the direction we’re heading.”
Tucker noted that the National Association of Home Builders this month included the Twin Cities to its list of 76 “improving housing markets,” which measures housing permits, employment and housing prices for at least six months.
Among other “optimistic indicators” he cited: The region’s relatively low 5.4 percent unemployment rate, historically low interest rates and the fact that rental-vacancy rates in the region are at record lows.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Roseville