Home supply dwindles

The housing market in Pinal and Maricopa counties still isn’t good, but it’s a good deal better than it was a year ago. That’s the conclusion of Michael J. Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. His monthly report on the two-county housing market contains a number of encouraging signs: -- Overall prices for single-family homes in the two counties combined have risen 8.3 percent in the last year. -- Supply of homes on the market is down 42 percent since February 2011. -- Monthly foreclosure starts were higher this February than the preceding month, but were down 9 percent from February 2011. -- The number of homes reverting to lenders at trustee sales has fallen 72 percent in the last year as normal resales and investor flips rose sharply and sales of bank-owned and government sponsored enterprise homes dropped significantly. The increased sales were accounted for in Maricopa County, however, as Pinal County’s overall sales actually dropped 1.3 percent to 996 during February 2012. But even that number contained some embedded good news as bidding at trustee auctions grew and more foreclosed properties went to third-party bidders. That means far fewer foreclosed homes were added to the inventory of banks and government enterprises.

Click here to view this article from its source.