A few housing-related stories have been popping up in the local media recently that are with checking out. Some highlights.
Mark Allen, our CEO, was recently interviewed by Steve Perry from MinnPost about the state of the local housing market. Gobs of good info in here, and we're glad to see a reporter make use of our brand-spankin' new interactive tool. A taste:
SP: There was also the first quarterly decline since 2003 in the number of lender-mediated properties coming on the market, right?
Allen: Correct. That's positive, but it's too early to tell whether that's a trend or just a brief hiccup in what's going on. We're very confident that we will see lender-mediated activity--that includes bank-owned properties, foreclosed properties, and short-sale properties--we expect that's going to be an active part of the marketplace for the next two to three years. But we also expect that sometime this year or next year, we'll have moved to the downside of that hump. And then it will gradually dissipate until we get back to a more normal market.
On the TV front, Edina Realty agent and blogger Aaron Dickinson sat down with Channel 12 ("Serving the Northwest Suburbs of the Twin Cities") to talk about foreclosures and short sales (warning the video takes a minute to load).
Finally, the Pioneer Press and the irrepressible Chris Snowbeck dig into the role of foreclosures in bringing down the overall median sales price:
Monthly sales figures are skewed by the fact that the foreclosure crisis is bringing a disproportionately large share of lower-priced homes to the market, Karvel said. That's exacerbating a limitation of the year-over-year comparison of median sale prices that always exists — different homes sold in January 2008 than last month.
"It's not directly comparable, and it's even less comparable with two years ago" when there were many fewer foreclosed homes on the market, Karvel said.
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