Arizona Real Estate Notebook

Phoenix Home Prices Stop Falling! In fact, greater Phoenix home prices APPRECIATED 1.1% between May and June! Case-Shiller hadn’t shown a single month with any appreciation in Phoenix since June 2006, that’s 3 whole years ago folks. Quite a drought! The last time Case-Shiller showed home price appreciation this large for Phoenix was in November [...]

Elliot Pollack writes about single-family housing construction; 2009 will mark the bottom of the single-family housing decline, panelists say, with permits dropping by more than 90 percent from the 2005 peak (see table). The recovery is expected in 2010, but panelists expect it to be merely modest. Permits for new homes will rise nearly 50 [...]

You might be a good candidate to buy a short sale home if… You don’t have to make your purchase contingent upon selling another home You’re willing to be patient You have strong financing or are paying all cash You don’t need a home right away You don’t need a large closing cost contribution from [...]

This is big news for real estate geeks like me. It’s especially big news for real estate geeks like me who depend on Google to send them traffic. The new Google is super fast and the results, at least for me, are similar to the old Google. WHEW! This new development version of Google’s search [...]

Appraisal problems have become a huge problem in real estate. The problems are caused by new appraisal rules called HVCC. Here’s the take from Jack Guttentag. Appraisals are informed judgments regarding the value of specific properties. They are not perfect because appraisers must work with incomplete information. Further, appraisers are subject to bias, the more [...]

I make enough mistakes of my own on this website that I’m chagrined when commenters attack things I didn’t even say. All my posts are still here. You can see my track record, such as it is. Nevertheless, there is some weird psychology going on when commenters repeatedly disagree with what I did NOT say. [...]

From ABC Channel 15 in Phoenix. “We started off with this long list of homes to see, now it’s more like maybe 10 and most will have multiple offers.” said Christina Koster, ” It’s silly, it’s like, where did all the homes go?” Homesmart Realtor Brett Barry says the amount of foreclosed homes has diminished, [...]

Here is another national real estate expert, Dan Alpert of Westwood Capital, who says Phoenix home prices have overcorrected. “Phoenix is the poster child for markets that have overshot.” He says from 1955 to 1997, home prices nationally were never more than 13.8 times rent. Home prices peaked at 28 times rent in 2006. Now, [...]

Speaking of cutting expenses, some readers have already noticed that I no longer have the zip code Home Listing Charts. Sayonara. Unofficial Charts Gone It was neat to have charts of home MLS listings trends on this web site. At the time I added those charts, they were really the only way for me, personally [...]

It’s almost cool here! Rain. Green. It’s lovely in Denver. I’m at a meeting of successful Realtors from across the United States and Canada. One of the main topics is cutting expenses. Most of these Realtors have teams so the most common way to cut expenses is to cut team members. A cut from 10 [...]