Breaking it Down (Part 3) Pine County

Today we'll head over to the other side of the Twin Cities, and north a bit. Pine County, Minnesota is generally in the 1-1.5 hour range north of St. Paul, up Interstate 35. Pine City -- bordered by Cross Lake and Pokegama Lake -- is at the southern end of the county, and Sturgeon Lake, along with it's namesake body of water, is on the north end.

You will find a bit of a crossover in the Duluth MLS in the northern part of the county, so some of the listings will only show up there. But for today's purposes, we will use data from the Northstar MLS from the Twin Cities, which will have most of the county's listings.

Just as we did in Wright County, we are only going to be showing statistics for the residential properties, as there are only 17 lake lots currently on the market, and there were only two of those sales last year. As I mentioned before, there really aren't enough lake lot sales near the metro area to get good figures on these, or ideas of value, so I will only use full stats in outlying areas.

So here is the data for the last three years:

Residential Lakefront Properties
Active on Market
62
Average Price
$269,782
Average (total) Days on Market
301

Solds 1/01/10 - 9/15/10
22
Average List Price
$216,450
Average Sold Price
$204,457
Average (total) Days on Market
174

Solds 1/01/09 - 9/15/09
26
Average List Price
$242,746
Average Sold Price
$223,179
Average (total) Days on Market
249

Solds 1/01/08 - 9/15/08
27
Average List Price
264,526
Average Sold Price
$242,539
Average (total) Days on Market
238

After looking at this data, it seems that the both the average list price and sale price in Pine County has come down signicantly this year, which also may be lowering the average days on the market. Perhaps those prices are getting to a point where buyers are seeing them as good values now and moving on them faster.

We will continue to keep looking around Minnesota and Western Wisconsin in the days to come, in search of the best opportunities in this market.