A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Burl Gilyard, a staff writer for the Minneapolis based Finance and Commerce magazine and website. 

Burl had called to gather more information for an article he penned about our latest Homeowners’ Market Fundamentals Index release; in that ranking the Minneapolis-St. Paul metroplex ranked 108th of the 185 markets ranked in our list. 

In our discussion I shared with Paul the basics of our ranking tool and my personal impression that Minneapolis suffers the most in our ranking assessment due to sluggish job growth and slowing rates of population growth. 

Burl was impressed (as are many) that six of the top ten cities in our ranking were in Texas; the regional economy in Texas (and several surrounding states) continues to plug along despite the woes of the national economy. 

One of our dear friends lives in Minneapolis and owns several multifamily projects there; his complexes are very well run, solid B Class assets, and are having their best year of the decade by his report today.  He noted the article above today, and emailed that in his mind, the greatest challenge for the entire state of Minnesota is their business tax structure and the fact that they are a right to work state. 

We’ve noted in both our blog and newsletter on more than one occasion that we’re striving to correlate business and economic trend changes with trend changes in single family and multifamily real estate.  While certainly economic conditions are a challenge across the country currently, we’re seeing very strong correlation between the status of investment residential real estate and a state’s right to work status.  Interestingly the correlations are strongest for multifamily investment real estate and the status of single family for long term homeowners.  Somehow the media and politicians haven’t picked up on that fact. 

The more time we spend researching these issues, the more convinced we become local economic conditions will have a greater and greater role in a local market’s housing recovery potential.  Don’t like the status of your local market? – change your local market’s leadership in November. 

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