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Scottsdale real estate market changing

 I got a call from a reader yesterday about the Scottsdale real estate market. She was worried that home prices might be weakening in her area. Also, she had watched this video of mine where I stumbled onto some erratic graphs for the Scottsdale real estate market. Before I checked out the situation in her community,…

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Diary of The Great Real Estate Bust – September 2006

 I’m trying and figure out what the hell happened during The Great Real Estate Bust so I’m going back over my old posts here in this blog to see what I was thinking at the time and to find the clues about the future that I missed. It’s sort of therapy for an economist. September 2006 For the Arizona housing market it’s a race between housing inventory and economic growth. As long as the economy stays strong, the housing market can work it’s way through the huge overhang of unsold homes. If the economy tanks before the inventory gets into line, then we would enter an economic slowdown with an…

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Another Possible Reason for Low Supply of Homes for Sale?

 Chatting with a real estate agent friend who’s with a large national franchise, I found out that a lot of their “listings” are promoted internally as “Coming Soon” listings and are sold before they ever hit the MLS. The friend said some luxury listings are sometimes in “Coming Soon” status for months. It’s a great way for large brokerages to capture both sides of the sale, they represent (make money from) both the seller and the buyer. I think this is a long term trend. I’m promoting “Coming Soon” more myself but not so I can get both sides of the commission but to improve the odds the seller can cut…

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Tutorial and Phoenix Market Update

 Watch full-size on YouTube. Phoenix Real Estate Market Update Supply is down and prices are up. That’s the story. Bye bye. Why supply is low is a bit of a mystery. But home buyers and sellers just need to know that for the metro Phoenix real estate market as a whole, prices are increasing and…

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New Retro Design for This Blog

 I changed the look of this blog once again. I had just changed it to a fancy modern theme last summer but decided last week to switched back to an updated version of a theme I used way back in the Dark Ages, 2008-2011. It’s called Thesis. Does the retro look bother you? Since 2011, I’ve changed the theme of this website 3 times, now 4 times. I’m never happy with it. But on the other hand, some of the biggest websites on the internet are retro as hell like Craigslist and Reddit. So maybe I should just focus on researching and writing stuff. Here’s why I changed Simpler navigation. It’s old school…

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Diary of The Great Real Estate Bust – Summer 2006

 I’m going through the first posts I wrote on this blog back in 2006 and it’s pretty humbling. I had NO idea that home prices would fall as much as they eventually did. I thought the towns on the outskirts like Queen Creek, Maricopa and Buckeye would be hit first and hardest but I had no idea how hard. My operating theory in the summer of 2006 seems to be that home prices would stagnate for several years and that real inflation-adjusted home values in metro Phoenix would decline slowly and orderly. I hadn’t yet learned about the huge lag times in real estate. I thought that because the number of…

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