Wisconsin’s home sales for April are down 11.6 percent compared to the same time last year – a decrease that the Wisconsin Realtors Association blames on a persistently long winter.
“The distance between accepted offers and when a place actually closes and a property transfers is about six to eight weeks,” said Michael Theo, the group’s president and CEO. “So these numbers are definitely being influenced by the weather in February.”
Parts of far northern Wisconsin got snow in April.
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A dour economy is also somewhat to blame for sluggish sales. Theo says national economic growth was almost flat for the first three months of the year.
“We saw the GDP nationally in the first quarter only increase by one-tenth of one percent,” said Theo. “Looking at the jobs numbers we see a little bit better news perhaps. We’re keeping an eye on those macroeconomic statistics as well to see what influence it might have on housing sales in the next several months.”
Even though sales fell, the median price of a Wisconsin home went up by 1.4 percent to just shy of $140,000.
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