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Price reduction on 4-bedroom Scottsdale home to $479,000

 What a great price for this home on the park! It’s priced less than the comps and the comps weren’t on the park so this home is a SUPER value! Please check the comps. Four bedrooms, pool, heated spa, updated kitchen, 2-car garage and a grassy community park behind the home. The HOA allows owners to put a gate in the fence so you and your kids and pets can have immediate access to the park. Imagine your family enjoying a grassy park just out your backyard and you don’t have to maintain it!

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Phoenix is many real estate markets

 ASU’s Jay Butler points out indirectly that metro Phoenix is many real estate markets from bust towns to flat towns. I bet Arizona has a few subdivisions with housing appreciation as good as Washington State appreciation. Butler detailed some statistics that showed the real estate market is suffering in Phoenix and in its surrounding areas, particularly Maricopa and the Queen Creek area. He referred to both as “bust-towns.” Maricopa’s median price for a home dropped from $256,000 two years ago to $219,000. However, the drop in prices hasn’t increased sales. The latest sales figures, from the week of Aug. 4, show 39 homes sold in Maricopa that week. During the…

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Good renters / Bad homeowners

 I love this quote. He blamed “bad public policy” and easy-to-get capital for the homeowner boom of the past decade, which turned “very good renters into very bad homeowners.” I don’t know how true it is. It is, however, a clever turn of a phrase.

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Arizona Real Estate Market at a Glance – Updated with August 2007 data

 Price The median home price (green line) in Greater Phoenix dropped another $5,000 in August to $245,000 after dropping $5,000 in July. That’s a 4% drop in 2 months. Looking at past years, it’s not uncommon to see another price drop in September before leveling off, more or less, through the remainder of the year. The number $5,000 seems very popular recently so that magnitude of decline in September wouldn’t surprise me at all. The question is whether the median price for Greater Phoenix will level off in October as it has tended to do in the past. This was my advice last month. If you have a home up…

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1 million increase in population expected for Maricopa County

 It was mentioned at the Real Estate Industry Partners Conference last week that the population of Maricopa County, Arizona is expected to increase by 1 million people over the next 10 years. 24% of homes Sell Quickly Also mentioned at the conference that of the homes sold, 24% of homes sold within 30 days. Homes are selling and many are selling quickly. If your agent says your home isn’t selling because “nothing is selling,” he’s wrong.

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Turbulent mortgage market means more deals go south

 A national survey says one out of every three home sales in August went south because of change in lending guidelines. Catherine Reagor is right about a couple of dozen of hands going up in a meeting of about 400 so that’s far less than one in three. That’s a tough deal where you, the buyer, are approved for a loan and right before closing you find out that the lender has changed its lending criteria or the lender has gone out of business entirely, and now you can’t close through no fault of your own. That’s a tough deal if you’ve already moved out of your home. Perhaps you…

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Camera for real estate

 It’s hard to find a good camera for taking real estate photos. The ideal camera for real estate will have: The widest angle lens possible so you can see as much of a room as possible in one photo The best flash possible so you can minimize the dreaded window burnout where the bright light coming in through the windows makes everything else in the room way too dark The smallest and lightest camera possible because you’ll be schlepping it around everywhere The lowest price possible Whoops! Yesterday, I thought I had lost my crazy-expensive Nikon camera set up ($2,500 and I still need a tripod). To console myself, I…

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Phoenix, Arizona – Hottest job market in U.S.

 More reasons why Phoenix will be one of the first real estate markets to rebound. Nowhere has the recovery been stronger than Phoenix, which is currently the nation’s hottest employment market, according to a new Bizjournals study. “Phoenix has seen a real boom, and it has been broad-based,” says Austin Litvak, an associate economist with Moody’s Economy.com, an international research firm. “The economy there really took off in 2004 and �05, largely due to the housing market and the large number of people moving into the area.” Phoenix has expanded its employment base by 23.4 percent since 2002, almost quadrupling the national rate. Its five-year influx of 325,100 private-sector jobs…

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