Home Sales and Foreclosures

With all the news coverage about the housing crisis have you wondered about the impact of foreclosed homes in our community? Several other questions also come to mind when considering home foreclosures such as: Are the number of foreclosed homes in our community still continuing to rise? What impact is this having on our tax roles? Will this impact the property taxes of those that own homes and property? What proportion of foreclosed homes are in SE Rochester? How many of these foreclosed homes continue to sit empty in our neighborhoods? Do you think they present any kind of security risk to neighborhoods? Have you noticed there's alot of homes for sale and have been for sale for quite some time in our neighborhood?

The Eastside Pioneers Neighborhood Association (ESPNA) will be attempting to answer some of these questions at some of our upcoming neighborhood meetings. The Post Bulletin published an interesting article, in their March 7 issue, entitled, “Rochester avoids worst of the real estate slump”. The article says that Rochester enjoyed relative prosperity during the nationwide real estate slowdown in 2007, with a 6.9 percent drop in single-family home sales and average home prices that stayed roughly steady.

Nationwide, sales of existing homes fell 12.8 percent last year, the steepest drop in 25 years. It is interesting to note that the article specifically pointed out that our side of town, the Southeast and Northeast quadrants, were considered the city’s hot spots for homes sales. Southeast Rochester had a sales increase of 10.6% and Northeast Rochester experienced a 5.08% increase in sales. According to Mikki Miller, president of the Southeast Minnesota Association of Realtors, "Southeast (Rochester) just does have a lot of good, standard, entry-level homes that tend to always sell well in any economy,"

Phil Wheeler, Olmsted County Planning Director, stated that, “ We had 342 foreclosures county-wide in 2007 and so far have about the same number through February 2008 as we had through February 2007. State projections are for foreclosures to continue to rise. Last year’s Olmsted County total was about 2 times the number in 2005.”

Wheeler, also stated, “There were 20 foreclosures in the area bounded by the Zumbro, the FMC, Silver Creek, and 4th Street SE (ESPNA boundaries); most of these are east of 11th Avenue SE. Another 4 were immediately south of 4th street SE.”

Wheeler said, “The East Side Pioneers area is not particularly hard hit by foreclosures in comparison with newer areas of town. A comparably sized newer area in northwest Rochester, for example, had 33 foreclosures, more than 50% more than ESPNA.”