Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

If you live in Phoenix and don’t mind getting up a little early on a Saturday, I’ll be speaking at the Arizona Breakfast Club’s meeting December 2nd.  The topic will be the Phoenix housing market. The Arizona Breakfast Club has been meeting since 1969. Many of their speakers have a political bent (Barry Goldwater used to address this group now and again.) but my agenda continues to be the state of the housing market.  Here’s the details:
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Hat tip to L, who sent us this warning from the MLS:

Home Rental Scam Alert

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As more home sellers give up on selling, they are increasingly turning to the rental market to cover their expenses.  But deciding to "just rent it out" isn’t always that easy.

I started tracking Gilbert, AZ rentals listed at Realtor.com last Aug 3, and the site listed 161 properties.  (A realtor told me in March 2005 that there were about 85 properties for rent in Gilbert, and she thought that was a lot at the time.) As of 11/21 Realtor.com listed 310 properties.  Apparently with full MLS access, you can see over 400 properties for rent in Gilbert- so we are looking at a tremendous surge in just the last few months.

While we weren’t able to get rental inventory numbers from last year, here are the current statistics for the Phoenix area.  These rentals are MLS only.  The MLS has not traditionally been as comprehensive a site for rentals as it is for sales.  Many rental properties are not included in the MLS:

ALL MLS

Properties for rent-                                7,794 (many of these are also listed for sale)
Properties leased in last 30 days-            1,979
Properties leased same period last year-   1,437

# Months supply 3.9
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