Filename: April 22nd Twin Cities Real Estate Update
Duration: 10:09
Hey, it's Travis Anderson here with Keller Williams Realty coming to you with your weekly update and on a weekly update you can see that I need a haircut bad. It has been way too long doing the shelter in place thing. In this video I'm actually going to show you where I've been getting this data directly from the MLS directly from the showing time information on the back of the Multiple Listing Service. Stay tuned, I think you are going to like this one.
All right, so here we are on the Multiple Listing Service. First I would like to point out right over here we have a market watch. It's based over the last seven days, 1706 new pending transactions over the last seven days. Similarly, we have 2293 new listings over the last seven days. So as you can see, it's really easy for me at a snapshot to just see what's going on in the marketplace. Looking at those two numbers, that's the two primary numbers that I've been looking at and sharing with you on a weekly basis, you can see that not a lot has changed in the last seven days than we had seen in the previous seven days and the previous seven days of that. 1600, 1700 people are buying homes. 2000 or so people are listing homes for sale. This is very, very, very good data.
One of the things we have access to is this program called Info Sparks. This is directly on the back of the Multiple Listing Service. What you are looking at here is a graph of monthly data broken down over the last 10 years and ending in March. Once we get to about the second week of May, this information will be updated for April as well and I'll be using that. What you can see here, I have a couple of things. Let's look at homes for sale. You can see here is the seasonality in Minnesota. More homes come in the market in the middle of the year than do towards the end of the year. They kind of peak right in the middle that June, July time, and that is a historical average.
What I've been saying is we have capacity for more homes to come on the market. What do I mean by that? If you look at this graph, 2014,15,16,17, those were good years of real estate in the Twin Cities. Look at how much more homes. We had almost 20000 homes for sale in 2014 and now in the peak of last year we had 13072, 13258 homes. Again, it was a very fine market in July of 2014. I was selling real estate then too. It was a very good market. So you can see we have capacity for this to go up.
Now this trend, what I can do is I can make this look more like a trend. So this is the trend line and again, this is where it was in the trend line in 2015 and 2016. We have capacity for more listings for sure. Similarly, if you look at pending sales, let me break that down to monthly. Again, you can see the number of pending sales peaks in the middle of the year and that is a seasonal average of course, and we are looking at all of the twin cities. If we look at the trend line, it looks something like that. So the number of pending transactions over the last 10 years, it looks like we are kind of going on the upward swing. We bottomed out over here in 2011. I think the market bottomed out in December of 2011, maybe January of 2012. This is kind of one of those indicators that would prove that to be true.
If I look at the supply of homes relative to the demand of homes, that's another thing that we could take a look at. Again, that's called month’s supply of inventory. Now you can see here, this is the trend line. So when the market was crashing, we had more months of inventory. In other words, we had 9 or 10 months’ worth of homes that were active on the market relative to the number of homes that sell in any given month. You can see as we have progressed over the last few years or over the last 10 years, you can see that we are way down here, 2.2. That means that we have two homes on the market for every one home that's selling in any given month on average.
Again, we are looking at the trend line. I can break that down by monthly, and you can see we have seasonality here. Because all three of these graphs have that seasonal, the seasonality, the parabolic curve that you are seeing, it means that they are, at least from the springtime all the way to the middle of the year. It's a real challenge to determine when the absolute best time to sell is. In my professional opinion, the best time to sell would be when the supply of homes is relatively flat and at the same time the demand of buyers is going up. I think that that's kind of the best thing that you can use. When we meet with our clients, a lot of times we are analyzing this data a whole lot more closely specific to their neighborhood and where we are looking at these things from that type of a lens. The point that I'm making here is I'm not grabbing this information and pulling it out of thin air. We have tons of data to show that we are doing just fine.
Let me show you where we can look at the showing activity report. We've got this target market analysis on the back end of the MLS. What I've been doing is I've been breaking this down by number of showings in a seven day period. So if I were going to go seven days from today... and actually what I've been doing is the previous day because if I were to use today's information, it's not going to be completed until midnight tonight. So I've been using the previous day minus seven days. If I look at that, it gives me the number of showings that has taken place over the last seven days. It looks like we've had 25000 showings over the last seven days.
What I can do is I can come in here and break it down from the previous week. In the previous week it looks like we had 19000 showings. I can come in here and do this again based on the previous week and it looks like we had 17000 showings. So again, this data, when people are saying that buyers aren’t looking at homes right now and everybody is sheltering in place, I agree that there are people sheltering in place for sure. When it comes to the real estate market, because we are a protected group and that obviously buying and selling real estate is an essential item of our lives, you can see the trend line here is the number of showings have actually gone up over the last three weeks. We have more people looking at homes today than we did at the beginning of this pandemic and than we did before.
What I haven't done is analyze this data over the last year too much. One of the reasons why is because I can go in here and I can go showings per listing and you can see here we are down about 10% showings over this year, over last year. We do have a little bit downturn in the number of showings, which is acceptable to me because there should be less showings because we should have less people going out looking at real estate. So my assumption is, and again, we are making a lot of assumptions based on this data, but the assumption is that people that are actually looking at homes need to buy homes.
This 10% drop, that just isn't a huge drop when you think about it. Could I make the assumption that 10% of people who are looking at homes at any given time are not really serious home buyers? Yeah, I think I could make that assumption. It's probably even more than that to be honest with you. Similarly, I might say that maybe 10% to 30% of showings that are happening are people who need to move in like the next 30 days and everybody else is maybe 60 to 90 days out.
What you can see here, and I'll look at the trend line, but you can see the trend line here from showing activity, it looks like we had a little bit less last year and we are still kind of on that plateauing of a trend of the number of showings. So there just isn't any data here that would lead me to believe that we are not doing just fine in the real estate market. What I wanted to do today is give you those data points, show you where I've been finding that information. Of course, the next step, we've talked a lot about the unemployment and I've been going to the state's website and of course, you guys are all familiar with that one website where you can search anything on called Google.
I have just been going to Google and I've been doing Minnesota unemployment and I've been making sure that I've been going to these websites that are the .orgs or the .govs and trying to find the statistics on there. And then if I find it somewhere else, I'm citing that information. Anyways, I hope that this is a really good video. We put a listing on last week; we had 31 showings and 15 offers. Buyers are out buying real estate, sellers are still selling homes. People are still showing homes. I think it's a great time. If you are curious about this more, give me a call, ask me any question that you might have and we can analyze this data specific to your market, not the Twin Cities as a whole.
I also wanted to give a big shout out to somebody here at the end of this video. Each week I'm going to say thank you to somebody a little more specifically. This week I would like to say thank you to Peter Lindquist. Peter is one of our preferred mortgage brokers. We have about five mortgage brokers that we really, really love. One thing that Peter and I have been doing fairly regularly is having conversations about this situation, how it's affecting his industry, how is affecting my industry, how we are navigating this process so that we don't go into some sort of a deep depression on a daily basis and also that we are not overly optimistic on a daily basis. He has really been helpful throughout the last month or so. I just wanted to give a big shout out to Peter and say thank you and I trust you are doing well. Thanks again everybody. If you have questions about anything moving forward here, just give me a call, shoot me an email, send me a carrier pigeon. I'm happy to help.