Arizona Real Estate Notebook

The “administration is considering several new ideas to help shore up the struggling housing market.” That’s scary. Most of these government programs are a waste of money, for example, the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit last year. That $8,000 program (the brain child of the National Association of Realtors) caused home prices to increase [...]

Catherine Reagor at the Arizona Republic does a fine job of reporting on the Arizona real estate market but now as the market is turning, she focuses on the confusion caused by the turn because not every indicator is positive. When the market first started to turn south, I think she was overly-pessimistic. The long [...]

The first impression of a non-Phoenix based commercial real estate guy is that Phoenix residential real estate is bottoming out now. I was struck by two things: (1) many of the recent sales in the neighborhood were well under $100,000. Some were as low as $50,000; and (2) the other shopping centers nearby were not [...]

“Peabody here. Let’s take the Wayback machine to 1999.” This neat graphic or, as the kids these days might say, “visualization” was made by John Burn Real Estate Consulting. You’ll see that the median Phoenix home price is the same as in 1999 and that’s not taking into account inflation! Powered by Tableau

Phoenix Home Sales Metro Phoenix homes sales (blue line) fell back to earth after the stratospheric Phoenix home sales in June 2011. Metro Phoenix single family home sales in July (7242) were still 21% above July 2010 (which crashed after the first-time home buyer tax credit ended in June 2010) but were below July 2009 [...]

Housing affordability is much better in metro Phoenix than it has been historically. In fact, metro Phoenix housing is 13% more affordable than it normally has been. This interactive graphic from The Wall Street Journal shows how incredibly affordable metro Phoenix housing is. It certainly supports the idea of an over-correction in metro Phoenix housing [...]

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 July 2011. For the first time since the spring of 2009, the Phoenix-area foreclosure rate has dropped below 30 percent of the existing-home transactions in the market. A new [...]

Conclusion The Phoenix real estate market is tight. The selection of Phoenix homes to choose from isn’t great but most prices and interest rates are spectacular.

This is the latest Case-Shiller data for Phoenix that splits the index into price points. The different behavior of the 3 price levels in metro Phoenix is absolutely fascinating. Tier Breakpoints (May 2011) Low Tier – Up to $95,997 Middle Tier – $95,997 – $168,172 High Tier – $168,172 and up My comments in the [...]