Top Transactions: Prior Lake house sells in two hours.

Byline: Anne Bretts

Editor's note:The Top Transactions feature focuses on the latest top home sales in the Twin Cities area, as well as noteworthy new listings, new residential developments and housing trends.Finance & Commerce checks certificates of real estate value filed with the Minnesota Department of Revenue as well as data from the Northstar Multiple Listing Service, Realtor.com, county records and other sources.

When Chris Rooney, broker in theRe/Max Preferredoffice in Prior Lake, got the listing for a local lake house at 14263 Shady Beach Trail NE, he thought it would sell quickly. He just didn't know how quickly.

Within two hours of walking into a showing on the home's first day on the market, a pair of decisive buyers made an offer. They closed Oct. 2 on the $1.475 million cash purchase.

Jeff Young, an agent withBerkshire Hathaway Homes Services North Properties in Prior Lake, represented the buyers.

The Prior Lake home certainly beat the average time spent on the market across the Twin Cities, according to the Minneapolis Area Realtors' monthly report for September, released this week. That number went up slightly in September from 42 to 43 days, compared with the same time last year.

As Finance & Commerce reported, buyers closed on 5,358 homes in the 16-county Twin Cities region in September, up 3.4% from 5,184 sales a year earlier.

The speed of the Prior Lake sale also beat the two weeks it took for Rooney to get an offer on a $3.155 million home on Lake Minnetonka, featured here Oct. 12. That sale closed Sept. 30.

Both homes were about the same size with similar-sized lots. Both sold for well above the median selling price for metro houses in September, which was $279,250. The median sale price in Prior Lake is $325,000, according to Realtor.com.

In general, buyers of homes on both lakes aren't just following a whim, Rooney said.

"They've been looking for a long time and you can't trick them," he said. It's similar to the situation in the luxury condo market and in other high-demand areas. Inventory for luxury homes is so limited that people often are willing to wait years for particular properties to come on the market. They also know home values, however. The Prior Lake home sold quickly because the price point was perfect and so were the house and its location on the northern...