Arizona Real Estate Notebook

ASU’s Realty Studies just released their monthly study on Greater Phoenix home prices. This is the study that I based the 14 city graphs I used to do before I created the zip code real estate notebook graphs.

The median home price opened the year at $230,000, which is below the $232,000 of December 2007 and last year’s $260,000. It represents a continuation in declining median price, which started at $265,000 in July 2007 [should read 2006].

So for Greater Phoenix, the median home price in January was 13% below the peak in July 2006, 12% below last January, 1% below December.

This is the lowest monthly median home price since $221,000 in April 2005, but better than the $194,000 reported in January of 2005.

Ah, the memories… of the median home price increasing $10,000 a month for a few months in early 2005. Everybody wanted to buy a home and sellers were real jerks.

That aggressive attitude that paid off so well for so many sellers for several months in 2004 and 2005 has caused a ton of sellers to ride the market down because they sure as hell were not going to sell unless they could get “their price.” Now, their home is worth significantly less than it was several months ago. The market has gone from greed to fear for sellers.

Online I can’t find the ASU Realty Studies press release so I reproduced it here.