The headline in the Wall Street Journal reads “Home Prices Rise in Metro Areas”.  Ah, if that were only true in Minnesota, Wisconsin or North Dakota.  At VALoansMN we constantly counsel clients on the value of their homes. We have several people waiting to refinance using a VA Loan if only their homes would return to values sufficient to allow a new mortgage. In other words, they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Our VA home loan clients in Minnesota are not alone. We’ll give you those numbers later. For now, we wish today’s news on median home prices was better.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is releasing figures for the final quarter of last year. True, many metro areas nationwide are seeing median price increases as reported in The Journal. That is not the case for home sales in Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, or Fargo. We at VALoansMN dug into the numbers a little deeper hoping to find good news. The good news is for other areas, not ours.

According to the NAR more than a third of the nation’s metropolitan areas saw median price increases. Markets that surged in the fourth quarter include San Francisco, San Jose, Cleveland and Akron. If misery loves company then perhaps we should cloud this good news with some gray. Analysts believe the median price surges of over 20% in those metro areas may have more to do with the decreasing number of foreclosure sales distorting the market rather than gains in home values.

Nationwide, says the NAR, the median price for a home is $172,900 which is just over 4% lower than it was in the fourth quarter a year earlier. That doesn’t sound great but it’s the smallest decline in over two years. We in the upper Midwest account for some of that decrease in price, again.

In Minneapolis-St. Paul and surrounding suburbs we see continuing declines in the median price for single family homes. This metro area was down 3.7% from a year earlier.  Madison, WI was down a whopping 10%. Milwaukee was down just over 3% and Fargo decreased by only a fraction of 1%.

As we mentioned earlier we at VALoansMN have several clients in several states wanting to refinance with a VA Loan if only their houses were worth at least as much as what they owe on their current mortgages. They’re not alone; about 1 in 5 owners of single family homes nationwide owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Take heart dear friends, the data show that even with this gloomy price report the market may finally be stabilizing. The number of single family home sales increased here in Minnesota by over 40% from a year ago. North Dakota saw a similar increase and Wisconsin was up by over 25%.

VA Guaranteed Home Loan, VA Mortgage Loans

Similar Posts:

Share