Phoenix housing market shows strong rebound

Two reports, one national and one local, suggest a healthy rebound in the Phoenix housing market. According to a report authored by Michael Orr at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Phoenix-area housing supply is down 42 percent from a year ago, foreclosures are down 52 percent from February 2011 and single family home prices have been trending upward since September 2011. CoreLogic, meanwhile, also shows a local drop in foreclosures, so much so that the Phoenix foreclosure market is tracking below the national foreclosure rate of 3.43 percent of outstanding mortgages. That number locally in January was 2.85 percent of outstanding mortgages, a decrease of 1.93 percentage points compared with a year earlier. The 90-day delinquency rate was 7.35 percent in Phoenix as compared with 10.07 percent in January 2011. The declining inventory numbers may be the biggest surprise. “Supply is tight in a pretty extreme way, and it looks likely to stay that way for months,” said Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W.P. Carey school. Including new home sales, median prices for single family homes were up from $115,000 in February 2011 to $124,500 in February 2012, or 8.3 percent.

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