Home Inventory at Low Levels

Home sales in the Twin Cities are up 29.4% year-to-date while the number of homes for sale has dropped 31%.

With just a 4.6 month supply of homes for sale, the inventory of homes for sale is below the 5 month supply that is considered a "balanced market" meaning the market is considered tilted in favor of sellers, a welcome change to many home-owners. This has led to a rise in the percent sale price compared to list price with sellers receiving on average 94.6% of their list price compared to 91.1% a year ago.

Driving this decline in inventory is a drop in bank-owned and lender-mediated short sale homes listed which are down 19.9% and 25.7% respectively while "traditional" owners selling their homes are up 4.1%.

With rents up, exceeding the cost of home ownership in many cases and interest rates at all time lows, the rate of home sales is not expected to decline, at least through the typically robust summer home-buying season.