Less Little Hammers Pounding Homes And Lives of Phoenicians.

December 17, 2009

Phoenix real estate mumble rumble. Some thoughts on our market: our market because we as a city own it.

By all accounts pricing seems to have stabilized and is moving upward in many price segments. Once pricing is firmly moving higher then there is a very good possibility of additional buyer confidence that will keep the market on a trajectory of improvement that will be a self feeding machine, a wheel with enough velocity of keep real estate firmly in the positive territory.

The snap-shot of the map above is an interesting view real estate. It's a small segment of a random neighborhood in Surprise. Note all the for sale and sold properties. Note, furthermore, the little hammers. These hammers represent properties with notices of trustee sales on them.

That means that they are pre-foreclosures, that the owners are late on mortgage payments and with not change the property will be foreclosed on. There are a lot of hammers, still, but many of those are homes for sale as short-sales that will actually sell to a new owner before the foreclosure.

I spoke about this mass transfer of property before. Almost all the homes in some areas are changing hands, entire neighborhoods and cities. Many are at the tail end of this transfer.

Notices of trustee sales are on a downtrend. There are less of these going out then before. More importunately more home sell or loans are modified before they go into foreclosure. This means the overall less homes are sold at the auction house then in previous months, though the numbers are still high.

As of early December there were 50,355 properties pending foreclosure, but this means all real estate, from land, to homes, to condos to commercial. From last years 29,251 this is high but a larger component of this is commercial and land.

There are no singes of the so called second wave of foreclosures. The first wave was huge and it's still not washed back. The the second wave, if it comes will be minor in comparison and when the amazing buyer vacuum out there, any wave will be quickly sucked up buy this powerhouse that is the current buyer pool.

Since April the early December the median price has increased 10% and this despite the seasonal weakness of the fall season.