Housing Doom

Mark Nash, a Chicago based real estate author, broker and columnist,  will be speaking at the Library of Congress on "Home buying, selling tips and trends for the 2007 transitional residential real estate market." ["Transitional" is PC realtor-speak for "declining."] Nash interviewed himself [No I'm not kidding, follow the link.] for Realty Times, explaining his views on "bubble-mongers." [That means us John!]

First Nash describes the "transitional" market:

Home owners and buyers understood that the frenzied real estate market in 2002-2005 was not the same one that we saw in 2006. The frenzied market was short on supply and strong on demand. Home sellers ruled. In 2006 with saw a shift to a more balanced market, featuring rising supply and weaker (but still the third strongest year on record) demand. However, many headlines gave home buyers the impression that they now ruled, which was not proven out, as prices rose in some delayed-fenzy markets, held or adjusted downward much less than the bubble-mongers predicted. The first half of the 2007 market could feature "deferred demand" buyers from 2006.

As for those "bubble-mongers"?
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According to one of our favorite sources, the Phoenix inventory rose to 45,981 at the end of February.  L checked for us yesterday, and the inventory stood at 47,011- an increase of 1,030 properties in six days.

According to ARMLS, Phoenix inventory was at it’s highest point last September, when inventory was at 48,443.  As of 3/7, we were 1,432 short of that record.

According to the Business Journal of Phoenix :[Hat tip John!]

More and more it’s looking like the local housing bubble just isn’t going to burst.

It may take sellers a little longer to close a deal on their homes, but odds are they’re not going to be losing any money. That’s according to Arizona State University’s latest edition of the Arizona Blue Chip Economic Forecast.

Although sales are down and inventories are up, home prices have not collapsed. The experts say it’s increasingly seems unlikely that home price declines, if any, will be very large in Arizona.

Local housing analysts estimate the Valley still has a six-month inventory of new homes to be sold. And there are more than 40,000 single-family resale homes on the market.

With sales just shy of 5,000 for February, and 47,000 homes for sale on the market,  that’s over a nine month supply of resale homes.  [ASU is only reporting an unsubstantiated new home supply.  Some sales/inventory numbers would have been a nice touch. Note they don't give sales or supply numbers for resales.]

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