While I sell all over the Twin Cities and focus on Dakota County, I have a special affinity for Rosemount since I live there. Recent sales data keeps coming in to discuss the rotten state of the housing market but it might be more instructive to give specific data for a city like Rosemount. Therefore, I decided to look at home sales statistics year to date through August.
Rosemount, MN Data
The Minneapolis Association of Realtors puts out monthly data on each city showing the overall sales transactions by month and year (seen above) but it doesn’t go very deep to show what might really be happening for real sellers who are interested in trying to market their homes in today’s tough real estate market.
So far in 2010 there have been 130 completed sales transactions for single family homes in Rosemount through August 24, 2010. You can see from the chart above that there were 174 through July but that includes townhouses and condos. While 130 transactions might not sound bad they break down as follows -
In other words, only about 1 in 3 sales are a traditional seller and we are averaging a paltry 8 sales/month for those sellers in 2010. There are more homes being sold that are bank owned and short sales (bank mediated) than traditional sales.
Median Sales Price Decline
The table below gives a very good idea of what’s happened to average sales prices through the decline in home prices over the past 5 years -
Rosemount has seen a drop in median sales price from almost $250,000 to approximately $200,000 today – almost a 20% decline.
Other Statistics
Other data you can gather from looking at the 47 sales that have taken place includes:
- The average Cumulative Days on Market for the homes that sold was 159 days. In other words, those houses that did finally sell had a long wait to find a buyer
- The average home had a final sale price of $104/finished square feet but this varied by $20+ each way (ranges from $80-$130)
- Of the 47 transactions, 31 of them had seller concessions needed to finalize a deal. The average seller concession for those 31 deals was $7,567
- The average discount was 5.2%. This is the amount of the final sale price from the list price at time of sale and includes seller concessions as a discount
- Only 12 of the 47 homes were sold without ever having a price reduction. In other words, almost 3 of 4 had a price that was too high to start with. The market is still saturated with both sellers who start out too high and Realtors who set too high an expectation to get a listing and then push price reductions later.
Conclusion
For those people that want to sell their homes, one of the most important decisions in selecting a Realtor is finding someone who can best set expectations about the current market. To do that you need to have data that gives the most accurate measure of the current state of the market. This view into the Rosemount, MN home sales statistics through August, 2010 is an example of what you should be asking for as it is readily available from the MLS.
