Arizona Real Estate Notebook

I ran into a friend and former client in the gym yesterday and he mentioned that he had just read that it would take New York more than 50 years to go through all of their foreclosures. That was cool because I was in the middle of researching that exact information before I went to [...]

Below is an email I received today on condo financing rules. Rules for Financing Condos Lending rules have become stricter in the past few years when financing condos with FHA, VA and even Conventional loans. You can go on the FHA website https://entp.hud.gov/idapp/html/condlook.cfm to search for FHA approved condos in a particular zipcode. You can [...]

Crunching some numbers while writing an article for McCormick Ranch Lifestyle magazine, I just put 2 and 2 together. Underwater Phoenix homeowners lower the potential supply of Phoenix homes for sale. (And lower supply tends to mean higher prices.) These underwater homeowners I’m thinking of don’t want to do a short sale because they aren’t [...]

In a recent post I looked at Phoenix bank-owned MLS listings (check it out) (only one-third as many as last November!) and the Phoenix shadow inventory of homes but I didn’t look at mortgage delinquencies. Phoenix Shadow Inventory Trends For Phoenix shadow inventory trends I looked at; Phoenix homes the banks have already foreclosed on [...]

Here’s a very important reason why the Arizona real estate market will be one of the first to recover. (I expect prices to start recovering next year in most parts of metro Phoenix.) The time from last payment made to foreclosure sale in judicial states is 761 days, which is six months longer than in [...]

This article in Forbes on the beginnings of a real estate bust in China used an expression I hadn’t heard in a while, “soft landing.” Back in the day, I believed the Arizona real estate market would have a soft (but extremely long) landing. After the 2008 housing price crash, however, the term “soft landing” [...]

But prices of Phoenix homes haven’t increased… yet. Source: The Cromford Report ADDED: Even though Phoenix home sales in 2011 are similar to home sales in 2005, home prices haven’t increase in 2011 because of supply. The supply of homes for sale is much higher in 2011 than in 2005. My previous post on Phoenix [...]

Conclusion The number of foreclosures (REOs, bank-owned homes) listed for sale in Phoenix has crashed over the last 12 months and now there is only ONE-THIRD the number of homes listed for sale by banks as a year ago in metro Phoenix. The Phoenix “shadow inventory” of homes (1. Homes that have already been foreclosed [...]

Phoenix Business Journal, September 5, 2006. Arizona held the No. 2 spot for job growth among states in July behind Nevada Those kind of headlines will eventually return. I was born and raised in Phoenix and have seen a lot of boom and bust cycles. This bust feels to me like Arizona in the late [...]

Yesterday I looked at several old posts of mine from 2006 and 2007 on this website looking for a “Best Of Arizona Real Estate Notebook” post. It was very revealing to me to read my old posts and see my opinions at the time. I thought I was hard-nosed but I can see an optimistic [...]

Here’s an old post of mine from 5 years ago, September 2006. In the last few days I heard someone on TV (don’t remember who or where) say something along the lines of, ‘When you see a TV show called “Flip This House” you know the boom is over.’ Very clever. Is it true? It [...]

From John Burns Real Estate Consulting. I wonder what the equivalent graph for Arizona alone would look like. I assume it would show that most of the deleveraging in Arizona has already taken place and our debt is getting close to its historical relationship to our income. As seen in the chart above, from 2000 [...]

Elliot Pollack reports some positive economic trends in his newsletter this week. IHS Global Insight, a leading national economics firm, predicts that Arizona will be one of only five states that will grow at a rate of 2.0% or more annually, between now and 2017. Other states include Florida, Texas, Idaho and Utah. In that [...]

The quintessential “data blogger” Seattle Bubble on the President’s new mortgage relief program. The main reason I’m not a fan of this “help people refinance their underwater mortgage” program is what I said just above: It only “helps people to continue throwing good money after bad for decades to come.”

(Keep us in mind if you have a house to get sold, too.) 4 Bedrooms (2 are master bedrooms) + Office + Loft + 3.5 Baths + 2-Car Garage This 3,904 square feet home in the wonderfully designed master planned community of Tramonto in North Phoenix has an upgraded kitchen and an enchanting spiral staircase. [...]

The charts in the zip code pages now have data through September 2011. See right sidebar of homepage for links to the zip code pages. If you live in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Carefree, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills, Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe or Ahwatukee I have separate websites exclusively for those areas and you can subscribe to [...]

Phoenix Home Sales Metro Phoenix single family home sales (blue line) in September (6,747) were the most sold in any September since September 2009 (6,923) 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 September 2011 (6,747) 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 September 2011. I really disagree with Dr. Butler’s spin that the crash in Trustee Sales (homes sold at foreclosure auctions) in September was somehow bad. I don’t understand his [...]

I just updated the weekly tables of homes sold for all the zip code pages (right-hand column of home page). In addition, over the last two weeks I’ve improved the format of the tables to make them cleaner and easier to scan. I rearranged the order of the columns so that the address is now [...]