Real Estate Market is Booming in Phoenix: What A National Housing Recovery Could Look Like

LA TIMES -- More Phoenix homes are selling than at any time since 2006. Prices are slowly stabilizing. Buyers find themselves in bidding wars over low-end properties. It's what a national housing recovery could look like.

Mike Orr, a Phoenix real estate analyst, thinks the market already has hit bottom. Among the signs: As recently as January, a year's worth of homes sat on the market; in March, that dropped to seven months' worth of inventory."It's a dramatic change in just three months," he said. "I never imagined it'd get this crazy this quickly."

In a throwback to the boom, real estate agents and investors are swapping stories of brutal competition for bottom-end homes. Orr called on one property to find it had already received 14 bids. Realtor David Thomas recalled getting a client in a $60,000 foreclosed home in the suburb of Avondale, on a street lined with vacant properties. He recently returned to find almost all the for-sale signs gone.

NY TIMES -- The low end of the Phoenix real estate market — and in some equally hard-hit places like inland California and coastal Florida — is becoming as wild as anything during the boom.

One real estate agent was showing a foreclosed house to a prospective client when a passer-by saw the open door, came in and snapped up the property. Another agent says she was having the lock changed on a bank-owned home when a man happened by, found out from the locksmith that it was available, and immediately bought it. Bidding wars are routine.

HT: Calculated Risk