Home sales and building are down in metropolitan Phoenix, but there are other indicators to track where the housing market is headed.

Here is a look at some:

• Home listings in the Valley climbed to almost 55,000 in the past few weeks. That’s a new high. The number of houses that are marketed for a short sale to avoid foreclosure or are bank-owned is also up. That’s good news for buyers looking for deals.

• About 85 percent of the Valley homes foreclosed on in July went back to the lender, according to the Information Market. That means fewer investors bidding on foreclosure properties on the courthouse steps. In many cases, more is owed on the home than what it’s worth now.

• Nationally, there are 500,000 to 700,000 new homes built but not sold, according to real-estate consulting firm Robert Charles Lesser & Co. Metro Phoenix’s share ranges from 10,000 to 20,000, depending on who’s counting.

• Housing analyst RL Brown has revised his 2007 Valley home-building forecast downward to 34,000. He’s calling for the same number of new homes in 2008, with the market starting to grow again in 2009.

• The median price of an existing metro-Phoenix home was $265,000 in July, according to the Realty Studies center in Arizona State University’s Morrison School of Management. The figure has been hovering between $263,000 and $265,500 for the past two years. Helping the figure from falling is a bigger percentage of Valley homes selling for $300,000 or more.

• The median square-footage for a resale home selling in July was 1,750 square feet, according to Realty Studies at ASU. Last year, the median square footage of resales was 1,650 square feet.

It’s another sign that bigger and pricier homes are selling.

• Metro Phoenix drew 61,600 new jobs during the fiscal year ending June 2007, for a growth rate of 3.3 percent. However, it’s a decline from the 100,000 new jobs created in both 2005 and 2006. Approximately one-half of this decline is related to the slowdown in the construction industry, said Ben Sage, director of real-estate consulting firm Metrostudy’s Arizona division.

• New-home prices in metro Phoenix fell an average of 6 percent this year, according to Phoenix-based Belfiore Real Estate Consulting. The firm says new-home prices have dropped 21 percent in the past 18 months. Recently, West Valley cities saw the biggest decline in new-home prices. Avondale’s cost for a new house fell 11.9 percent, and in north Buckeye, prices are down 9 percent.

• The median sales price of a home sold in the Las Vegas area decreased to $295,000 in July, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. That’s down 5 percent from a year ago. It’s also the first time Sin City’s median-home price has dipped below $300,000 since April 2005. A record 20,273 homes are for sale in Las Vegas.

The housing market is slowing nationally. In some cases, metro Phoenix is faring better. Real-estate analysts were calling for the market to start to rebound or at least hit bottom this year.

Now, many are looking to mid-2008.
Source:

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0819biz-catherine0819.html

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