Interesting notes from John L. Wake’s Arizona Real Estate Notebook:
Dr. Jay Butler, the head of the Arizona Real Estate Center at ASU, made a presentation yesterday at the Industry Partners Conference, an annual meeting of real estate industry folks – agents, escrow officers, mortgage brokers and many others.
Looking at listings for sale as a percentage of the total number of homes in the Valley (the housing stock), Dr. Butler said the normal number of listings today would be 32,000 to 35,000. I found the actual number this morning to be 41,014 (all home types) in Maricopa county. So, listings are high right now… but not super high.
Given that we have added an enormous number of houses to our inventory over the last three years, I had wondered what our baseline normal should be by now. It will be a couple of years from now before we know if Dr. Butler is right (yes, those words did emerge from my fingers!), but his projection seems to correspond to the observed data: Our surfeit of available homes is not so large as to induce fire-sale pricing.
John has a very rich weblog, including excellent city-by-city graphing of Dr. Butler’s median home price numbers.
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