ALL PHOENIX REAL ESTATE

At the end of last week I made a small change to the search capabilities here and on my other half-dozen websites. Since the beginning of August I’ve been requiring those looking at homes on the sites to register with a name, phone number and e-mail address if they want to see property details after running a search.

As of last week, you now have three free searches and eight or so properties you can view before you have to sign up. (If you want to save your searches, you still need to register but this is common sense - you can’t save searches and have updates sent to you if the software doesn’t know where to send them.)

Why the change? In short, it’s because I found myself following up with people who only wanted to know the list price on the house around the corner from them. Which is fine as far as it goes, but when you’re in the business of helping people buy and sell homes and when time is limited because of the crush of people who are looking at more than one home at any given time, I needed to prioritize who I added to the database and who I didn’t.

And that’s the full extent of the logic. To my admitted surprise, I’ve had next to no pushback on the registration in general. Yes, there are the jerks who think their creative fake names are funny, but if there hasn’t been at least a valid e-mail address these folks got dumped from the system before they finished their initial search. No sense wasting precious resources on the unappreciative.

So that’s the change I was able to make. Now for the one I can’t …

On these sites, I have all of the homes for sale in the Arizona Regional MLS (the lone exceptions are those handful of homes where the agent has opted not to have the home marketed via the Internet, which means you won’t see it here, through anyone else’s IDX search or on azcentral.com. Basically, the sale is a secret.)

Not everything you see is my listing. So if you see a listing with only one photograph, that’s all I have to show you because the listing agent couldn’t be bothered with a second photo (much less several more.) Likewise, on these homes my knowledge is limited to what you see in the listings. At some point after we decide to work together I can work to get more information, but at first blush what you see is all I have.

One last thing that isn’t a change so much as a heads’ up. When you’re looking at the listings, check the property details for the following entry - “Contingency”. If you see that, there’s already an accepted offer on the home and the best you’re likely going to be able to do is make an offer to be placed in backup position. In some cases, there could be many others already ahead of you in line.

Of course, if you’re looking for something a tad more specific and a little more timely - daily updates to your inbox, for instance, drop me a line and I’ll get you up and running with a personalized search that will allow you to review the homes as they hit the market.

Happy hunting!

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Take another 1,200 homes off the Phoenix real estate market.

As of a few minutes ago, there are 27,296 single family detached homes for sale in Maricopa County. With 5,943 closed sales the past 30 days, we’re looking at 4.59 months of inventory - down about a week from last week’s report.

In the bank owned arena, there are 5,155 active listings in the Phoenix real estate market and there were 4,035 closed sales the past 30 days. The result is 1.28 months of inventory, roughly five weeks’ worth.

The absorption rate for non-bank owned also fell to 11.60 months.

A handful of cities have slipped below three months of inventory led by El Mirage at an almost unthinkable 1.78 months (130 sales the past 30 days, 232 listings.)

As always, the details for the cities and towns in the Phoenix real estate market are listed below. And also as always, all data is provided by the Arizona Regional MLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

Phoenix Real Estate Inventory: May 5

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One of the topics at last week’s REBarCamp Phoenix was the use of Facebook to further facilitate the conversation in the effort to create a more robust online community. Or something equally impressive sounding.

So this weekend, just before I fried my desktop computer (don’t ask) I created a specific Facebook page for All Phoenix Real Estate.com. There are a couple of slide shows already there with more to follow once my desktop computer and the photos sitting there come back home (don’t even THINK about asking about backup - ask my wife how well I took that one).

Most intriguing are the discussion pages - essentially a community bulletin board. I’ve posted a couple of general topics to get things going and am looking forward to seeing where things go from there.

Of course, purely for the sheer ego of it all, there’s a running count of how many “fans” the page and by extension the blog has. So if you’re one of my four loyal readers here and also have a Facebook account, it would be really, really great if you’d put yourself down as a fan of the page. This also works if you’re only a friend of Tobey.

And how can you not be a fan of the beagle that rocked BarCamp Phoenix?

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We’re going to learn a great deal about the Phoenix real estate market over the next couple of weeks. Lender moratoriums on foreclosures are coming to an end and, depending on who you talk to, the market’s soon to be flooded under a vast wave of backlogged foreclosures.

Except … no one’s really sure where things stand.

Theoretically, the moratorium was supposed to be on homes already in foreclosure. Yet what you hear quoted often are the number of homes where Notices of Trustee’s Sale (a public notice that the homeowner has 90 days to get current or the house will be sold on the courthouse steps or revert to the bank) have been extremely high over the past couple of months. One of the bubble blogs said there were more than 10,000 notices issued in Maricopa County last month.

Doesn’t sound like a moratorium, does it? In truth, the moratorium was limited in scope - only owner-occupied homes qualified. If the owners already had left or the home was owned by an investor, the process has been preceding as before.

There’s little question that the number of bank owned homes on the market will rise in the coming weeks - there were less than 4,000 new single family detached REO listings in Maricopa County in April. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

Consider that there’s less than six weeks of bank owned inventory on the market. Double the number of foreclosed properties and you still have only three months of inventory at the current sales pace, which still represents an extremely fast-moving market.

The spike we’ve seen the past two months have lifted all boats; inventory of traditional sales have fallen along with the inventory of bank owned homes. Nearly a year of inventory isn’t necessarily anything to write home about, but it’s better than 18 months to two years of inventory, which is what we had seen not so long ago.

Everyone who reports on the market has a slant of some sorts. Bubble bloggers need to report the doom and gloom because that’s their purpose in life. Many real estate agents spout that it’s a good time to buy because they don’t know how else to communicate with the public - they’ve never realized the power of honesty.

Me? I realized long ago there’s no such thing as a good or bad market. What’s good for one could be bad for another. I spend yesterday meeting with someone who was afraid the already low listing price I quoted was too high for their purposes. For a rare moment in a listing presentation, I was the optimistic one.

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen these next couple of weeks. No one can. The definitives you see are little more than guess work. Maybe we’ll be overwhelmed, but the Phoenix real estate market has shown for months that it’s more than capable of handling a higher level of bank owned inventory.

What I do know is the buyers have emerged from the woodwork, the latent demand we’ve talked about now is apparent in the rise in closed and pending sales.

Whatever may come, it’s going to make for an interesting May.

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Yes, dear readers, it’s time for more fun with the Fair Housing Act.

Last Friday a group of us were discussing various scenarios when the subject arose of how to answer the question, “Would you live in this neighborhood?”

One agent said he had answered honestly, that he probably wouldn’t. I said I thought such an answer was a violation of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits agents from steering buyers toward or away from any given neighborhood based on things such as race, national origin, religion, familial status, etc. A third said he would answer such a question because he’s being asked a direct question and giving an honest answer.

The entire debate troubles me.

What difference does it make whether I live somewhere? You may know me from the blog or if we meet in person, but do you really know me? Probably not. To my mind, in asking such a question you are asssuming I am like you in some way, shape or form. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. But those assumptions can be damning.

Are you, for instance, assuming I’m someone who only would live in a neighborhood with a certain racial makeup because you only want to live in a neighborhood with a certain racial makeup? I can’t direct you toward a neighborhood on that basis - it’s against the law for me to do so - but you’re making that assumption and may believe that is what I am doing. And just because you want me to do that doesn’t mean I can do so.

And I’m not certain that giving an honest answer to a direct question would qualify as a defense, since there are honest answers we can give to other direct questions that are absolutely 100 percent against the law.

It’s because of the Fair Housing Act that I make no effort to know the demographics of any given neighborhood and when confronted with the stats, as I have been in the past, I delete them as soon as they come in. Legally, it cannot matter to me what the makeup of a neighborhood is (aside from age-restricted communities, incidentally, where I can tell you that everyone’s at least xx years old) and so I have no interest in the information.

And it’s because of the Fair Housing Act that if you ask me whether I’d live in a certain neighborhood, I’ll tell you that my answer doesn’t matter and is illegal to boot.

Am I being overcautious? I’ll allow for that possibility. But I’m not up for risking my livelihood to find out I was right all along.

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