Foreclosures in Phoenix
Sunday August 24, 2008
It has taken me a while to come up with the home price data for the period ending June 30, 2008. One of the reasons for the delay is that there is so much foreclosure activity going on that the standard data seems to have taken a back seat!
© David McNew/Getty
For example, in June 2008 there were 3,275 foreclosed homes and 4,565 traditional residential real estate transactions. Compare that to June 2007, when foreclosures accounted for a mere 660 houses and 4,080 were regular sales. The 2008 year-to-date total for Greater Phoenix is 18,060 foreclosures and 25,755 traditional sales. That means that 41% of the homes sold in the Phoenix metro area this year were foreclosures!
© David McNew/Getty
Here are the new home and resale home figure for April 1 thorugh June 30, 2008. When will we start to see those median prices inch upward again?
Comments
Phoenix leads the way in America with falling home prices, dropping thirty percent in the last year- but- Don’t buy a house yet. Wait! Realistically, the home prices in Phoenix should eventually drop by 90% while the Scottsdale homes might only give up 89% of their current assessed value.
Scottsdale is purgatory- where you may be burning in a better zip code- but you’re still burning.
HO-HO-KAM
“Hundreds of years before any of the cities in the eastern part of our country were so much as clearings in the wilderness, a well established, civilized community occupied the land we know as Phoenix. The Pueblo Grande ruins, which were occupied between 700 A.D. and 1400 A.D., testify to our city’s ancient roots. The wide Salt River ran through the Valley of the Sun, but there was little rain and no melting snow to moisten the brown earth from river to mountain range on either side.
Those former residents were industrious, enterprising and imaginative. They built an irrigation system, consisting mostly of some 135 miles of canals, and the land became fertile. The ultimate fate of this ancient society, however, is a mystery. The accepted belief is that it was destroyed by a prolonged drought. Roving Indians, observing the Pueblo Grande ruins and the vast canal system these people left behind, gave them the name “Ho Ho Kam” — the people who have gone.”
Phoenix is a city that rises from the ashes of the Ho-Ho-Kam. Time to strap the hubcaps on your heads boys—Summer’s Here! Don’t you have a dome on your stadium? Think BIGGER! The Romans showed you how to do it when the built the Pantheon. You can put a big fan in the hole and blow the hot air out. You can build the dome out of plastic by using all the broken bumpers discarded by the people that failed to complete a left turn in your city. You can paint the dome blue and green and offer sanctuary to dehydrated motorists and sluggish Camel Caravans– headed for the Coast.
What was that all about. Four million perfectly square blocks with traffic lights in between all of them and- no left turn signals. That decision precipitated the four million body shops which sprung up on the four million roasting saltines. Beautiful. Kudos. When Glen Campbell got to Phoenix, she was rising, but by the time he got through the place, she was in a nursing home.
“From the air, metro Phoenix looks like a mirage, a glistening, shimmering city of 2.3 million, undulating across a vast expanse of desert, its sprawl stopped only by craggy mountain ranges to the north, south, east, and west.”
It was within that Primordial Pie Plate that the ooze first settled and began baking three billion years ago. The ground is so hard that you can shoot it and make slugs for the soda machine– which is Empty!
Phoenix is a giant checkerboard–
painted on a skillet-
sitting on a stove-
with the burner on MELT.
You’re the Blue Light Special!
Phoenicians! Follow the Example of your own Predecessors, the HO-Ho-Kam. New information has been released about them through the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. At a Tribal Unity Festival in 1399, the tribe rigorously discussed “The 700 Year Drought”. The Contents of the summit meeting at the festival are now a matter of Public Record
CHIEF “We need to take a New Direction”
Various Tribe members offered suggestions until the Shaman stood and the Cactus Lodge went quiet.
Shaman “I agree with Chief Roasting Lizard. We need to take a new direction. NORTH! This Place is hot Chief! Let’s forget about the vision of our grandfathers. We have to be realistic. We gave it seven hundred years of hard work and six million rain dances but—The Beavers Aren’t Coming! They NEVER Will. Just the names that we’re giving our kids now is depressing, I mean really Chief- Rolling Raisin and Stands with a Burn. We haven’t had a Frolicking Fawn- let alone a Beaver- in six centuries, man. We’ve all got names of reptiles now. I don’t have to tell you that People grow into their names, Chief”
They left the plate forever, quietly, at night, with a new name and a new vision and a new Tribe Motto– HO-HO-HO-
location- location- location
Wayward Wynd
Addressing your first paragraph, and notwithstianding your diatribe about HoHoKams, the following information as obtained from RealtyTrac:
“With one in every 70 households receiving a foreclosure filing, Arizona posted the nation’s third highest state foreclosure rate in the second quarter. Foreclosure filings were reported on 37,230 Arizona properties during the quarter, up nearly 36 percent from the previous quarter and close to four times the number reported in the second quarter of 2007.”
Of the top 100 metro areas, Phoenix came in at #7 for foreclosures in Q2.