Home sales are on the rise across the state, according to new data from the Minnesota Association of Realtors, but those gains lag those in the Twin Cities metro and other densely populated areas.
During June there were 8,125 closings statewide, a 4.5-percent increase compared with last year at this time. So far this year, closings are up 2.6 percent.
Prices are on the rise, too, with the median sale price of all closings hitting $185,500 during June, a nearly 14 percent increase compared with last year.
The report demonstrates how uneven the recovery is taking hold statewide, with some of the biggest improvements happening in places where the jobs market is improving the fastest. In the Twin Cities metro, for example, closings during June were up 7.8 percent, with the median price of those closings rising more than 18 percent to $210,000 during June.
MAR tracks sales for 13 several-county economic development regions that loosely conform to markets that are represented by associations that report their sales to MAR. A quarter of those regions saw sales decline compared with last year, but it's important to note that the total number of sales in each region every month is small and subject to statistical variations.
During June, the Arrowhead region, which includes the communities in the Iron Range and along the North Shore of Lake Superior, posted the biggest the strongest sales last month with a nearly 30-percent increase in closings last month. So far this year, sales increases have been most robust in the Upper Minnesota Valley region where sales are 14.3-percent ahead of 2012.
