Phoenix Real Estate: What IS normal???

This morning, I visited Elliot Pollack’s web site,  ArizonaEconomy.com to get a more global perspective on Phoenix population growth, employment, real estate statistics. It had been awhile since I spent much time cruising this information-packed site.

Here are the pages I recommend reading to get a quick sense of where our local economy is:

Greater Phoenix Population Growth (%) - Looking at the past 30+ years, you’ll see how cyclical Phoenix growth as been even though the area has continued to grow year after year.

Greater Phoenix Employment Growth (%) – Again with 30+ years of data, you’ll see that this not the first time that the metro area has experienced job loss. However, it is the first time that negative job growth was documented for two consecutive years.

Properties In Foreclosure – Clearly, you’ll see evidence of the "shadow inventory" that many have referred to.  These are the homes that are in pre-foreclosure, where the bank has not foreclosed on yet.

Single Family Sales – Here are a couple charts I put together after reviewing the data on this page.  Looking at just resale figures, it appears that 2009 home resales will end up close to, or over, 100,000 properties, which puts it on track to approach or match the number home sales in 2004 and 2005.

However, adding in new homes sales paints a slightly different picture, one where total new and resale home sales will exceed the past several years, but are not record setting, by any means.

Months Supply of Resales – This is the chart that begs the question, "What is normal?" Over the past six years, Phoenix real estate has been anything but normal, with the market bouncing from sellers to buyers, and then appearing to head back to a seller’s market.  You’ll see there may be some sense of normalcy in the near future.

As usual, time will tell.

Tagged as: phoenix economy, phoenix home sales, phoenix job stats, phoenix real estate