Arizona Real Estate Notebook

Via azcentral.com. Paradise Valley … the median home price fell about 14 percent in Paradise Valley – the Phoenix area’s most expensive residential community – from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31. It was the second-biggest decline among cities and towns. Home prices in Paradise Valley don’t look bad anymore… for Paradise Valley, anyway. Tempe Even [...]

Sheet 1 Here you go Peter. Custom made chart.

New widget in sidebar. See the number of visitors currently viewing Arizona Real Estate Notebook right now. I would have preferred to show pageviews because Arizona Real Estate Notebook excels at pageviews per visitor. Arizona Real Estate Notebook gets over 2 pageviews per visitor. That’s because we carry detailed information on the real estate markets [...]

Dr. Jay Butler of Realty Studies at Arizona State University came out with his Phoenix area residential real estate sales and median home price numbers for September 2010. Greater Phoenix – Median Home Price (Single-family resale homes. Excludes repossessions but includes sales by banks after they repossess. ASU calls these “Traditional Sales”) September 2010: $135,000 [...]

Well-known value investing guru Whitney Tilson thinks there may be a silver lining to ForeclosureGate. Later Rather Than Sooner I don’t see the economic incentive for the banks to play ball under Tilson’s scenario. If a bank modifies a loan now, they have to book the loss now. The current bank strategy is to “Delay [...]

The price mechanism for mortgages is broken because banks don’t have to book their real estate losses until they foreclose. Homeowners have already taken HUGE hits in their home asset values but the economic adjustment is stalled there because the banks haven’t adjusted the value of their underlying mortgage loans. Those pretend real estate values [...]

Chart via Wall Street Journal. We’ve seen some good signs. The number of new foreclosures has peaked nationally. New foreclosures are extremely high but at least they aren’t growing for the first time in years. Chart via Business Insider. However, what hurts home prices is not the number of new foreclosures but the next step, [...]

Bank of America extends its foreclosure freeze to all 50 states. The banks have been very slow to foreclose anyway and this legal snafu gives them a justification for extending their internal delay-and-pray policies. The fact that the policy has been extended to Arizona which wasn’t involved the in signature brouhaha shows, perhaps, that their [...]

See the latest trends in actual home price appreciation – not median home prices – through June 2010 using data from Karl Guntermann of ASU. Here’s my earlier post on Guntermann’s Phoenix home price report. The city data in the graph below is only through June (which is the latest available using Guntermann’s statistical analysis [...]

Karl Guntermann at Arizona State University came out with his latest Repeat Sale Index (ASU-RSI) for metro Phoenix. Guntermann’s index is the Phoenix equivalent of the famous Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Both indices measure home price appreciation (and depreciation) better than just looking at the median home price. … house prices turned down slightly in [...]

APNewsBreak: BofA delays foreclosures in 23 states Arizona is not one of the 23 states. I think the banks were looking for an excuse anyway to delay the huge number of incoming foreclosures. The delay in foreclosures will also delay the real estate recovery for many months in those areas but, heck, they were a [...]

You don’t need anything else to see what’s happening with the real estate market in your Phoenix area zip code. Video Comments I show sales in several zip codes including Paradise Valley, the Troon area in Scottsdale, Anthem and Gilbert, Arizona. Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to fix this. All 124 Phoenix [...]