The following article was written for the Cromford Report and is based on the data from ARMLS. Arizona Multiple Listing Service. It begins with August 2011 data. This is a complete snapshot of what is happening in the housing market.
Apparently spooked by the debt crisis and the corresponding turmoil in the stock market, the middle and upper end of the market went quiet in July and August, especially for homes over $2,000,000, but the demand for homes under $100,000 continued to go from strength to strength and supply is now very low in several of the lower priced locations.
Sales per Month: 8,734 in August - up nearly 3% from July and up 26.5% from this time last year.
Active Listings (excluding AWC): 19,216 on September 1 - down 4.8% from August 1 and down 47% from this time last year.
Pending Sales: 11,508 on September 1, up 0.2% from August 1, and up 17% compared with this time last year.
Listing Success Rate: 74.4% on September 1 - almost the same as on August 1 and up significantly from 57.5% on September 1, 2010.
Days Inventory: 99 on September 1, down from 105 on August 1 and 172 at this time last year
Cromford Market Index™: 155.6 on September 1, up from 151.5 on August 1 and 85.5 on September 1, 2010. (This indicates a shift from a buyer’s market to seller’s.)
Sales Price as a Percentage of List: 96.79% on September 1, up from 96.55% on August 1 and 95.75% on September 1, 2010
Please don't waste time looking for negative signals among these numbers. There aren't any.
The numbers say the market is in very good shape with demand far outstripping supply. However, most potential homeowners (understandably) would disagree. Normal home buyers tend to pay far more attention to their emotions than local housing market data. Most people are still experiencing too much fear to consider home ownership or upgrading, with an uncertain economy, poor employment statistics and the psychology of crowds discouraging them from taking advantage of the lowest pricing in over a decade, even with low interest rates as the icing on the cake. In addition, we have some very real factors keeping pricing down. Appraisals are almost universally conservative, often coming in lower than the buyer is willing to pay. Lending is highly constrained by extremely cautious underwriting. A large number of homeowners have negative equity putting a damper on their financial plans. In fact, almost everything is the exact opposite of the first half of 2006, when the numbers indicated clearly that the market was headed for disaster but nobody paid any attention. Then we could see appraisals supporting ever increasing prices, lending policies were more relaxed than ever and everybody seemed to believe that prices could only go up. Indeed they believed this right up to the point of collapse.
Now it seems to be popular to believe that prices will fall further. Indeed with the current negative sentiment it is certainly possible they may fall a little further for a short while, especially if the upper end of the market stays quiet. However it is also inevitable that they will at some point increase from the current level and the market statistics indicate that this may be sooner than most people think. When demand is well above normal and supply is well below normal, prices cannot fall indefinitely. In the past the laws of supply and demand have only been ignored for about 18 months at maximum. Then we have seen them cut in with a vengeance. We have gone 9 months so far with the market indicators and pricing going in opposite directions.
So where is pricing now?
In contrast to the spring, prices are now falling at the higher end of the market. The lower end has achieved stability in sales pricing while asking prices are strongly rising and pending prices are showing early signs of increases in certain markets. Competition among landlords for good rental homes is extremely strong and the markets in their favorite locations are very active. This is also reflected in prices paid at trustee sales, which are more competitive now than at any time since 2005. El Mirage, Maricopa, Tolleson, Avondale, all have extremely low levels of inventory, so low that sales volumes are now being affected. The number of lender owned homes for sale in many of these areas is a tiny fraction of the peak level of the winter of 2008/2009. A comparison of REO single family home inventory in January 2009 and September 2011 is very revealing:
El Mirage has declined from 295 listings in 2009 to 22, down 93%;
Queen Creek has declined from 569 to 87, down 85%;
Phoenix has declined from 4544 to 765, down 83%;
Glendale has declined from 882 to 175, down 80%;
Peoria is down 77%, Mesa 73%, and so on down to Paradise Valley which now has only 8 foreclosures total.
This data disputes the rumors that there is still a "huge glut of foreclosed homes for sale.”
The main trends we currently see are:
• banks have increased their asking prices for REOs as they become scarcer
• short sales are getting cheaper and easier to close, though far fewer remain active without an offer
• normal sales include a higher proportion of "flips" rather than owner occupier sales and therefore average prices are falling
• luxury homes are selling in lower numbers
• HUD homes are selling like hot cakes (which also brings pricing averages down)
So we shouldn't expect to see good news from pricing numbers for a while yet. For those who would like some good news, here is a selection:
• pending listing counts dipped after the Spring peak but remain strong for the time of year
• expired and cancellation listing rates are very low
• active listing counts are moving sideways whereas they would normally be increasing at this time of year
• the supply versus the annual sales rate is lower than at any time in the recent past with the exception of the bubble years 2004 and 2005
