Adam Tafel - Upside Property Sales

09/17/2026

Congrats to my sellers on this one!

Another duplex SOLD ✅

09/17/2026

I got curious about what people who own duplexes in St. Paul have actually made, and I don't mean what Zillow says the market did, I mean what the same building sold for the second time around.

So I went back to 2012 and pulled every 2-4 unit building in the city that sold and then sold again. There were 828 of them.

The middle one was bought at $199,900 and sold at $300,000 about four and a half years later, which works out to a gain of $90,375. Almost all of them made money, 96.6% in fact, and the 26 that didn't includes everybody who had to sell in 2023 when rates blew up.

Here's the part I wasn't expecting. The East Side beat Mac-Groveland, and not by a little. Duplexes in Payne-Phalen returned 9.2% a year while Mac-Groveland and Summit Hill returned 5.1%. When you rank the neighborhoods by return, the list comes out almost exactly backwards from what the neighborhoods cost.

Now to be fair, Mac-Groveland owners made more actual dollars, $103,500 against $71,300, because those buildings cost more than twice as much to buy in the first place. So if you've got the money and you want the bigger check at the end, that's a real argument. But if you're trying to get the most out of a smaller down payment, the data says go east.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that the year you bought mattered more than anything else you could have done. People who bought in 2015 made 10.1% a year, people who bought in 2021 made 4.7%, and people who bought in 2022 made 2.4%. These are the same buildings in the same neighborhoods, and the only real difference is that the typical purchase price went from $150,000 to $345,000.

Two things I should be upfront about. A building has to sell twice to show up in this at all, so anybody who bought well and is still happily holding isn't counted. And a few of the biggest winners did major renovations, which is construction, not the market.

If you own a duplex here or you've been thinking about buying one, message me and I'll send you the neighborhood breakdown.

09/16/2026

09/14/2026

09/12/2026

Open Houses at this great Cathedral Hill Condo this weekend!

Check it out for yourself.

09/11/2026

Don't sleep on this duplex.

Upper unit has FOUR bedrooms and NEW flooring.

DM me for more details.

09/10/2026

Everybody I talk to assumes rent control tanked St. Paul property values, so I finally went and checked.

I pulled every duplex, triplex and fourplex sale in both St. Paul and Minneapolis going back to 2012, which came to about 11,000 sales. Minneapolis is the right comparison because they never actually passed rent control, their council voted it down, and otherwise it's the same metro with the same rates and the same everything. One city got a rent cap and the other didn't.

What I expected to find was that St. Paul fell behind after the cap took effect in May 2022. What actually happened is that St. Paul closed the gap.

A St. Paul unit used to cost about 73% of what the same unit cost in Minneapolis, and since rent control it's been running around 83%. This year it's at 87%, which is the closest the two cities have ever been.

The usual response to this is that sales dropped in St. Paul, and they did, by about 25%. But Minneapolis dropped the same amount at the same time, which tells you that's mortgage rates going from 3% to 7%, not an ordinance. Days on market went from 15 to 33 in St. Paul, and Minneapolis went from 14 to 31, so it's the same story there too.

I want to be clear about one thing, because it matters. This is small buildings only, two to four units. Big apartment buildings are a completely different animal, and new construction permits in St. Paul really did fall off a cliff, so those are separate questions that I'm not answering here.

But if you own a duplex in St. Paul, four years of actual sales say your building is fine.

Happy to send anyone the full breakdown.

09/08/2026

Another happy duplex buyer! ✅🏠

If you're looking to buy a duplex before the calendar change to 2027 it's not too late...

Fall is here, the market is shifting, but I'm ready to take on some more buyers and finish 2026 strong.

09/07/2026

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09/04/2026

A low list price can create competition… but at what point does it become a terrible strategy?