I was spending a crazy amount of time looking at Phoenix real estate numbers trying to figure out what impact the Coronavirus was having but I kept getting lost in the weeds.

I needed a quick overview of the Phoenix market. I wanted something that would look at the market from 50,000 feet and was easy to understand. I wanted to know what the metro Phoenix market as a whole was doing before I dove into sub-markets.

The total project took me a crazy amount of time! First, I had to understand the data and what I wanted. That tooks days. Then I had to figure out ways to explain the data clearly and to design and code the graphics. That took even longer.

They say the best way to learn something is to teach it, so forcing myself to simplify the Phoenix market forced me to learn the market better.

Sunday Updates

I plan to update the graphs on Sundays and write posts analyzing the latest data. To get the latest updates, subscribe to ArizonaRealEstateNotebook.com near the upper-right corner of this page.

If you want to look at a clean page with just the latest Covid-19 weekly graph and no analysis, go here. You might want to bookmark that page.

Here’s the new graphic. I hope it’s as useful to you as I wanted it to be.

I love this design because it’s intuitive. You can see the pipeline of houses as they progress from hitting the market to being sold. It’s easy to see the weekly changes to the pipeline and how things changed after Covid-19 hit.

I included 2019 so you could visually compare 2020 to a more normal year. 2019 wasn’t really a normal year – no year is – but it was more normal than 2020.

Longer-Term Trends

I have a graphic that goes back to 2000, the Phoenix Real Estate Market at a Glance graphs. I’ve been updating them for many years. But that’s monthly data and Covid-19 is changing things so fast monthly graphs are too slow. That’s why I needed these new weekly graphics.

An Old Friend Returns

I hadn’t updated this blog – Arizona Real Estate Notebook – very often in recent years. Many years ago, it was one of the top blogs on Phoenix real estate (it has over a million pageviews) but as its Google rankings and traffic fell, I turned my attention to trying to understand the economics of real estate markets in general over at RealEstateDecoded.com.

Stay Safe

Now, the Phoenix real estate market is changing fast again. Like the whole world right now, it’s full of uncertainty and chaos. We don’t know how long or how deep the pandemic will be. We don’t know how long or how deep the real estate slowdown will be.

I hope that having this extra bit of information will help you make the best decisions possible, under the circumstances, for your personal real estate situation.

In the meantime, take care of yourself. Stay safe.

Comments welcome below.

(This post was written on April 18, 2020.)