For an animal lover like me, it’s heartbreaking to see how many animals are abandoned when their owners go into foreclosure.  It happens more often than you might imagine.  An organization called Lost Our Home Pet Foundation started in Phoenix as a resource for realtors who keep finding abandoned pets in foreclosed homes.  They have taken in 2000 animals in the past four years as well as starting a “pet food bank” to try and help people in difficult financial situations be able to keep their pets.  Now the organization has their own large shelter: [Thanks L!]   It’s heartwarming…
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If you’ve read anything at all about housing this year, you’ve read that the housing market is “improving”.  Offered up as evidence is the fact that inventories have been falling across the nation.  Clearly buyers are snapping up properties again, right? Sales have improved in a number of markets — for example in Phoenix sales were down only about 10% YOY in March which is still above the lows of the bust years –  but that’s not the entire picture.  For some reason new listings (not total listings but the ones added during the month) have been dropping for the…
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There’s all kinds of investors these days who see themselves as the latest Donald Trump of foreclosures.  A number of them use “Email blasts” to market their latest “fix-and-flips”.  L graciously pulls some of the more interesting ones out of his spam trap and sends them on to us.  Here’s one of them: So what’s interesting about it?  It’s just another “conventional” sale, right?  Not this baby.  It’s not only flipped– but flopped– and back again.  Check out how often this thing has been foreclosed on: Granted, this isn’t typical.  We’ve seen a fair number of double foreclosures though. Often…
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For nearly six years, we’ve been following the Maricopa County [Phoenix area] Home Sales Report done by Dr. Jay Butler, ASU professor emeritus of Realty Studies.  Back in 2008 there was a bit of a scandal when it was shown that Butler’s inclusion of trustee’s sales was skewing the sales numbers.  After that, Butler’s broke sales out into “traditional sales” and “foreclosures”.  It has also not uncommon for listings to indicate whether or not they are a “traditional” sale.  Here’s one example from L’s spam mail: You might think, based on the listing, that this home is sold by an…
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Back in 2005 when real estate had become insane in Phoenix, homes were selling so fast it was not uncommon to hear about “double escrows”.  What’s a double escrow? A double closing is simply two back-to-back closings wherein the proceeds from the second closing is used to fund the first closing. Both closings are done in escrow so that the “middleman” can buy and resell a property for profit without using any of his own cash. Of course, once the insanity was over and the bubble popped, a lot of would-be flippers ended up being known as “bag holders”, the…
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Catherine Reagor, real estate reporter for the Arizona Republic, must have taken the easy way out a few days ago and just published a press release as “news”.  She “reported” on a “penny auction” for a home in Phoenix: [Thanks L!] Penny auctions are popular for selling everything from gift cards to cars at discount prices. Now in metro Phoenix, a former foreclosure home is scheduled be auctioned off cent by cent. Real-estate agent Todd Talbot plans to hold an online penny auction for a Glendale home next week. The house at 6214 W. Acoma Drive, Glendale, was purchased for…
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What has happened to the housing inventory in Phoenix?  Inventory has dropped to an extremely low level.  In 2005 when inventory dropped, prices shot through the roof.  In January though prices only showed an insignificant increase: At the beginning of 2011, there were 40,000 single family homes for sale on the Maricopa County Multiple Listing Service, which was way above the 25,000 level considered a healthy market by local realtors. Today, that number, which includes foreclosures and short sales as well as regular listings, has plunged to 13,000 homes listed for sale. But prices? While Miami and Phoenix were the…
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Long time readers know that I have reservations about down payment assistance programs.  Buyers that use DPA have been shown to have a higher rate of default.  One of the big barriers to home buying is the lack of a downpayment though, and if we don’t buy homes, banks don’t make money. Wells Fargo has recently announced that they are setting aside billions of dollars for down payment assistance programs in the cities of Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta.  Borrowers in Los Angeles can receive up to $30,000.  In Phoenix and Atlanta, borrowers can receive up to $15,000.  Here’s what…
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I thought this video was funny.  It’s a Fox news report from Phoenix about homebuilders scaling down the luxury features in new homes.  The report said that homebuilders are eliminating features like outdoor kitchens and whirlpool tubs because “most people don’t use them”.  I couldn’t help but wonder if the builders are now trying to tell us, “We can’t put luxury items in homes and compete with existing home sales, but that’s OK.  You folks are too practical for these features.” Luxury Items Being Dropped From New Homes: MyFoxPHOENIX.com My guess is that people do still want the luxury items,…
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Back in March of 2009 we first started looking at home sales by price bracket in Phoenix.  The numbers looked like this:   Three years later I thought we would compare the numbers and see how the market compares.  Here is January’s chart, based on the January report from ARMLS: [February numbers are not yet available.]   The most striking difference is the inventory, which has dropped by 50%.  Sales are 32% lower. (Part of that difference should be seasonal, January sales are generally slower than in March. Inventory also starts to build this time of year as more people…
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If you weren’t in the Phoenix area in 2005, you couldn’t possibly understand the level of insanity in the real estate market.  It seemed that the phone would ring daily.  Agents would call asking, “Are you thinking of selling your house?  Do you know anyone who is thinking of selling their house?” Listings would be snapped up, sight unseen, by investors desperate to own real estate in Phoenix.  This kind of furvor meant that people would almost any price for a property, no matter how unusual, or how inconveniently located. L sent me a perfect example of such a property…
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Back in 2003 Phoenix had one of the nation’s highest homeownership rates, but the housing bust has changed that.  According to the 2010 Census, Phoenix homeownership rates dropped to their lowest level since 1997, and that still might be overestimating the case: But the measurement accounts only for occupied homes. Calculate owner-occupied homes as a portion of all homes – including vacant ones – and the actual homeownership rate would be far lower. The number of vacant homes in the Valley – those that are not second homes or vacation properties – has climbed by nearly 200,000 since the last…
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During the boom we watched acres and acres of farmland ploughed under and turned into housing developments and shopping centers.  While we have only seen a few developments actually ploughed under, there have been a number of acres that were slated for development, that are not going back to farmland: [Thanks L!] Rick Gibson, University of Arizona county extension director and agriculture agent in Pinal County, said the real-estate crash has farmland once sold to developers finding its way back into agriculture, especially in Maricopa and Pinal counties. “Some are buying or coming back to them when the buyers defaulted…
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The Arizona Republic had a headline yesterday that announced, Phoenix area foreclosures way down in October.  This was the monthly article the Republic does every month based on the Existing Home Sales Report by Dr. Jay Butler.  Back during the boom these articles focused on rapid appreciation and booming home sales.  Here’s this month lead-in paragraph: Home foreclosures made up 26 percent of all home-resale transactions in October, the lowest percentage since April 2009, according to an existing-home sales report issued Monday by Arizona State University. In spite of the optimistic headline though, Butler remains skeptical of the “improvement”: The…
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It’s been awhile since we’ve looked at sales data out of Phoenix.  One of the more interesting trends I’m seeing in sales is actually how it relates to rental data. [Thanks L for the data!] Rental data from ARMLS (The Phoenix area MLS service) is not as comprehensive as the sales data.  Many homes and apartments are not rented through the MLS.  However, I believe that for comparisons over time, the information is useful.  Here’s how the data compares: Note that even though there have been significant swings in home sales over the past 11 years, rentals have grown in…
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