Arizona Real Estate Notebook

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]