Multiple offers are increasingly common in 2012 real estate.

There are numerous signs out there that housing is recovering, and the folks at Redfin have presented yet another one – the preponderance of multiple offers.

Seventy-one percent of respondents in the brokerage’s Real-Time Home-Buyer Tracker reported that when they signed an offer on a property, they faced competing offers. The survey sampled nearly 6,000 buyers who had worked with Redfin agents in 18 major metropolitan areas.

Other valuable information in the survey included:

• 28 percent believe now is a good time to sell, up from 13 percent last quarter.
• 58 percent believe 2012 prices will increase, up from 34 percent last quarter.
• 63 percent cite low interest rates as the reason to buy now, the most popular rationale by a large margin;
• 58 percent of respondents said they were “very interested” in conventional sales, up from 48 percent last quarter (suggesting that demand may be broadening beyond cheap REO properties).

We just reported that good first impressions were especially necessary in the recovering economy with the supposed rise of multiple offers, and Redfin’s data would seem to confirm that suspicion.

And such situations are arising in markets across the U.S. We’ve already reported extensively on them in Chicago, but in addition, Redfin made mention of a prospective buyer in Boston who was interested in two properties – one that had seven offers, another that was under agreement by the time of its first open house – and in Miami, examples abound of the area’s red-hot market.