Arizona Real Estate Notebook

John Talbott at Seeking Alpha; I have been waiting for more than five years to offer this advice. It is now time in most cities across the country to buy a new home or refinance your existing home with thirty-year fixed rate mortgage debt. And this from the author of The Coming Crash in the [...]

1) Economic Answer. The banks may slow down a bit on the speed of foreclosing because they expect/hope their Phoenix homes will be worth more later. 2) Organizational Answer. The banks have created and staffed, over several painful years, a bank foreclosure bureaucracy and that bureaucracy will not want to slow things down and become [...]

From Mike Orr at The Cromford Report; For the monthly period ending December 15, we are currently recording a sales $/SF of $84.47 averaged for all areas and types across the ARMLS database… The current price level is 1.4% higher than last year on December 15. I probably need to say that again to let [...]

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 November 2011. Greater Phoenix – Median Home Price (Single-family resale homes. Excludes repossessions but includes sales by banks after they repossess. ASU calls these “Traditional Sales”) November 2011: $130,000 [...]

John Burns Real Estate Consulting points out the devastating fact that total student loan debt is now greater than all credit card debt combined! Yikes! Student loans are going to be yet another hurdle for the housing market to overcome. Faced with mounting student loan debt, poor job prospects and stagnant wages, an increasing amount [...]

165 posts in one month? That’s a little scary, actually. I guess I was new at blogging 5 years ago and trying out different strategies. 165 posts in one month was not a successful one. It’s interesting to me to see how short many of my posts were back then, they were almost like Tweets. [...]

I got a call yesterday from a gentleman in Houston who had some questions about how to use a website of mine to find Arizona homes for sale (and, yes, you can find the actual property taxes paid on my websites). I have dozens of websites where you can find homes for sale. Most of [...]

Washington Examiner. The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class [...]

From Bloomberg’s look at state taxes. Arizona Income tax: 4.54% Sales tax: 6.6% Property tax per capita: $1,043 Inheritance tax: None The tax burden in Arizona is small compared to that of other states because of its lower-than-average property taxes, so the decline in home prices has hit Arizona’s municipalities harder than those in many [...]

Seattle Bubble blog made this great visualization of Case-Shiller Home Price Index data showing the number of years of appreciation that have been “lost” with the real estate bust. Phoenix home prices are where they were in January 2000, according to Case-Shiller data so it’s actually more than a lost decade, 11.7 years. But, in [...]