NW Phoenix Real Estate Guide

Wow – What a month!  I thought April was nuts, but the Month of May would prove to be much more active.  These last couple of months rival even the boom months of September and October of 2006 in terms of actual units sold.  Let’s go straight to the charts, and remember that clicking the chart will enlarge it (will open in a new window).

In keeping with the broken record theme, it is easy to tell here that sales are up (over 9,000 homes sold in May) and inventory is down (just over 40,000).  In fact, inventory is down below 5 months, and I’ll put an asterisk next to this statement, but that is what many define as a ’seller’s market’.  I put an asterisk next to it only because this is not a normal market…

Again, units sold are up considerably and the time it takes to get a home sold is down slightly.  One thing to note is the widening gap between Agent Days and Cumulative Days. This would indicate that buyers have to one degree capitulated to the market.  One agent is unsuccessful in selling the home, so sellers find another agent who likely tells them that they will need to reduce the price of the home in order to get it sold.  The longer it is on the market, the more agreeable sellers become.  Interesting little thing I’ve bee watching for a while…

We can see here (again) that sales volume is very high, and for the second month in a row, we’ve experienced some market appreciation – about $6,000 in the last 2 months.  That doesn’t sound like much, but  I think I have said before that when you’ve been losing $8,000 in value every month for the last 2 years, putting a parachute on is a priority, and the last 2 months show a very promising trend.  As I’ve pointed out before, any time you have the list price and sold price lines moving closer together, you should see a slight spike in the list price in the next month.  Perhaps we are just testing the bottom of the market, but I look for this trend to continue.

We’ve seen these numbers represented in different graphs already, so I’ll spare my expert analysis, but my wish is that things will continue to creep back up and out of the hole that they’ve been in for so long.

This is a difficult chart for me to read now.  I used it for several months as a leading indicator of what preparations this market was making prior to arriving the cautious bottom making the upward moving that we’ve seen in the last 2 months, but I don’t know exactly how to look at it moving forward…  Hey at least I’m human and admit that which I do not know.  This one may have little commentary associated with it over the next couple of months as I figure out how to use it now.

There are definitely some major economic factors at play right now, so I am cautious about calling this a bottom, but I think we’ve lost all of the value that this market is willing to lose (I hope that makes sense).  I think we’ve reached something of a tipping point – something we’ve been waiting on for several months – and I think, by and large, we’ve reached a point of relative agreement between buyers and sellers – something you must have in order for a market to work.

Stay tuned to this space in the next month for the latest in Phoenix real estate, but feel free to check out our real estate resources section of our website – we update it frequently.  Thanks again, and let me know what you think.