• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Email

I have been looking at a lot of numbers this week in an attempt to make sense of our local real estate market.  The downtown St. Paul condo market is unique, so I ran some numbers just for downtown. The data came from our MLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

The data is for a one year period from July of 2008 to the end of July 2009 so that I could get a years worth of data on sales and sale prices.  Some of the condos are new construction and there is a longer period of time between the offer and the closing and I wanted to get as much data as I could that shows actual sale price which is not  available until the sale closes. 

• 345 downtown condos were listed during that period with an average list price of 240K and an average sale price, for those that sold of 196,734.  The average asking price for the units that actually sold was $203,590.
• 130 of the 345 units that were listed during the period  sold and the cumulative days on market for those units was an average if 212 days. 

There are currently 145 units on the market and they have been on the market for an average of 232 days, with an average asking price of $271,713. Twenty three of those units are in some stage of foreclosure. 

There are a couple of things going on with these numbers.  Lower priced housing sells more quickly weather it is a condo or not and that has been true across the board in St. Paul for the last eighteen months.

The fact that only about one third of the units that were listed sold is somewhat alarming. It isn't unusual for condo owners to give up on selling and decide to find a renter.  Renting out a unit is always an option but as the owner occupancy rate in the buildings drop it gets harder for people who want to buy a unit in the building to get financing.  Units in some of the buildings no longer qualify for FHA financing and we are even finding cases where buildings do not qualify for most types of conventional financing.

.