Month: December 2005 (page 2 of 2)

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Being who we are, we settle for nothing less than the best we can do. We’ve been persisently dissatisfied with the way that market values have been reported for Valley homes, so we’ve come up with our own Market-Basket of Homes. If you pursue that link, you’ll see our thinking, but if you want you can skip ahead to the actual numbers.

This is a moving target, for now at least. As we get a better idea of what we’re aiming for, we may revise the search criteria. If we do, we’ll revise all the numbers to reflect our changes. But even now, at the beginning, we have a better lens for understanding what is really happening with the real estate market than the one provided by ASU.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

The West Valley sections of the Arizona Republic ran this story on the expected surge in apartment-to-condominium conversions on the same day they ran my column predicting just that outcome.

They said:

Condominium conversions are happening all over the Valley, with new projects in Glendale, Phoenix, Chandler and Scottsdale.

Real-estate brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis predicts about 6,000 apartments in the Phoenix metro area will be converted to condos by the end of the year.

What makes them appealing to potential homeowners is that they are relatively cheaper than single-family homes and a better investment than renting an apartment, experts say.

October figures for home sales in the Glendale and West Valley areas list the median condo sales price at $159,900, compared with $299,900 for a single-family home, according to the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service.

“It will offer an affordable alternative to someone who can’t qualify for a new home,” said Greg Burger of RL Brown Housing Reports. “It’s a much better alternative than renting.”

I said:

If there are suddenly a great number of qualified home buyers with no homes to buy, it’s not difficult to figure out what will happen over the coming months. Here’s the prognosis:

We will see more apartment-to-condominium conversions, especially at the low end of the price scale. There are qualified buyers with zero available inventory at the same time that older apartment communities suffer huge vacancies. This is an entrepreneurial opportunity.

My columns are written well in advance, so the two articles running on the same day is purely serendipity. But I think the conclusion I draw stands as a stout rejoinder to all the Chicken Little rhetoric we hear from allegedly-informed sources:

Finally, expect the unforeseen. Where there is increased unmet demand, there will be increasingly creative solutions to meeting that demand.

This is the dynamism of the free market, and this is why the sky so rarely falls, despite persistent predictions to the contrary.

For every ten people wailing, “What will we dooooo?!?”, there is one entrepreneur wondering, “How can I make this work to my advantage?” Chicken Little grabs the headlines, but it is the entrepreneurs who have given us all the wealth Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Today comes the news that the City of Phoenix, in its desperate need to pretend to be a city of the East instead of a city of the West, is paying street performers, who are normally mendicants, to infest downtown:

A stretch of Adams Street in the center city is now known as “Performance Street,” and over the next month, and possibly longer, performers will be entertaining workers over the lunch hour twice a week as they walk to and from restaurants and dine at outdoor tables.

“We’re going to turn Adams Street into a stage of creativity and vitality,” said Brian Kearney, president and CEO of the Downtown Phoenix Partnership, which is coordinating the program with the help of funding from businesses.

The idea came from Mayor Phil Gordon, who was impressed with the street performers he saw during a visit to Santa Monica, Calif. “A community isn’t a community without artists and performers,” Gordon said during a ceremony kicking off the program.

Because Kearney didn’t know how to find street performers, he turned to Stephen Strange, a Phoenix vaudeville/circus performer who said he tapped into the “loose network of street performers” in the Valley. They will be paid a nominal fee, plus tips, to perform along Adams on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at various downtown spots on nights when there are major events.

“It was important to get paid something because there is no real culture of tipping down here yet,” Strange said. “Hopefully that will pick up.”

In the cities of the East, the picking up is done by the police, who roust street-performing vagrants because they block pedestrian traffic. This is something the City of Phoenix could discover if there were any pedestrian traffic downtown.