The Arizona Republic - March 2008
Sales of existing homes in metro Phoenix climbed from January but declined 13 percent in February compared with sales recorded a year earlier, an Arizona State University realty expert said Tuesday.
The median resale price for single-family homes dropped 15 percent, to $220,000 last month from $260,000 in February 2007, said Jay Butler, director of realty studies in the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus.
In February, 3,710 sales were recorded, compared with February 2007's 4,280. Homes selling for less than $200,000 now make up 40 percent of the resale homes for sale in metro Phoenix, Butler said.
A bright spot in the report shows that last month's numbers were better than January's, when 3,350 sales were recorded. January's median price was $230,000.
The increase in sales could be a sign that the spring home-buying season is starting.
“For some people, it's a win, a great time to buy,” Butler said. “Yes, prices are probably going to go lower, but there are a lot of people out there willing to help people get into good mortgages now.”
On the other hand, Butler said, homeowners who purchased or refinanced at the 2006 market peak will have to sit tight at least “for a couple years” if they want to sell for as much as their purchase price.
Butler predicted that people who bought homes in built-out areas will see prices recover more quickly than those who purchased on the fringes of the metro area, in places where neighborhoods and shopping centers remain unfinished.
“What we went through was a really crazy time,” he said, referring to the $85,000-plus surge in median resale-home prices from 2004 to late 2006, when median prices rose to $260,600 from $174,815. “We had never seen big increases in prices before,” Butler said. “We got caught up in this frenzy, and it is going to take awhile to work our way out of it.”
