Arizona Real Estate Notebook

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 [...]

Elliot Pollack shows some emotion in his newsletter this week. The Ugly The inability of this Super Committee to come up with a solution that would entail bridging a 2.5% gap in Federal Government spending over the next decade ($1.2 trillion out of an expected $46 trillion in total Federal budgeted spending over the next [...]

If you put 20% down, it’s cheaper to own a home in Phoenix than to rent, at least according to this Wall Street Journal graphic. Powered by Tableau Who would have thought 5 years ago that we would ever see a graph like that!

Wall Street Journal video. U.S. Mortgage Delinquencies Mortgage delinquencies are, of course, the first stage in the foreclosure pipeline so fewer delinquencies now mean fewer foreclosures later. Many states, however, have been very slow to foreclose and have huge backlogs of in-process foreclosures. That means fewer delinquencies now won’t lower their foreclosures for a long [...]

I feel better. According to measures used by The Economist, U.S. housing prices are UNDER-valued. First, since American homes now look cheap, are prices set to rebound? Average house prices are 8% undervalued relative to rents, and 22% undervalued relative to income (see chart). Prices may have reached a floor, but this is no guarantee [...]

Most of the article is behind a pay wall but you can see this. The Phoenix housing market is defying conventional economic theory. Inventories of homes for sale are low, falling 41% to 21,304 in October, compared to 35,732 at the same time a year ago for Greater Phoenix, according to the Cromford Report, a [...]

For Greater Phoenix, job gains were 43,200. That equates to gains of 1.8% for October, 2011 vs. October, 2010… While these gains are modest and weak… at least employment is growing. In housing news, R. L. Brown reports that 543 permits were recorded in October compared to 485 in October, 2010. Year to date, there [...]

Phoenix Home Sales Metro Phoenix single family home sales (blue line) in October (6,464) were the most sold in any October since October 2009 (7,034) when sales were pumped up by the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit. Factoid: More than twice as many homes sold in metro Phoenix in October 2011 (6,464) than in [...]

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 October 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”) October 2011: $125,000 [...]

Even most Arizona Realtors believe the urban myth that banks have held back tons of Phoenix homes from the market and eventually when the banks release those homes, home prices will fall again. It is true that some markets (for example, NY, NJ, CT, MD, IL and FL) have a huge “shadow inventory” of homes [...]

Elliott Pollack & Co weekly newsletter had some good news and some scary news. Good News On a local level, Arizona retail sales (September data) continue to grow at a reasonable pace. Retail sales were up 8.8% over year earlier levels. Strong growth was reported for automotive and building material categories. Car and truck sales [...]