by Carrie Watters - Oct. 25, 2008 08:08 AM
The Arizona Republic
Several West Valley communities are among those seeing the biggest drops in home prices in Maricopa County, with El Mirage taking the biggest nosedive, according to The Arizona Republic's analysis of Valley home values.
The median price of new and resale homes in El Mirage dropped 32.5 percent when comparing the first eight months of 2008 to 2007.
The working-class Northwest Valley city is the only place in the county where foreclosed home sales exceeded traditional resales. Of 382 houses sold this year through mid-September, 53 percent were foreclosed homes.
More remain on the market.
Early Tuesday, Lesego Lidge raked up yard trimmings in front of her stucco home on Willow Avenue in El Mirage. Next door, overgrown bushes claimed the front of what used to be her neighbor's home. It has been sitting vacant nearly a year - a telltale "code enforcement" notice plastered to the window.
Across the street, a "bank-owned" sign looms in front of another house.
Lidge and her husband bought their home in 2005, at the height of the Valley's housing bubble.
She hopes the market stabilizes before her husband retires from the military in a year and they consider moving.
Lidge said she has no illusion that prices will rebound enough to make a profit on the sale of their home.
"I just don't want to be upside down," she said, returning to her raking.
The common denominator in falling values is the mix of bank-owned homes. It's never good for sellers when the for-sale signs on their homes are joined by foreclosure signs at their neighbors'.
"There have been many times that we had to drop the price to beat the bank," said Michael Martell, a Re/Max Integrity Realtor in Glendale and the Northwest Valley.
On the flip side, the foreclosures must be absorbed - and that presents some great prices for buyers.
In most Valley communities the overall median price on traditional resales is $20,000 to $40,000 higher than the foreclosure resale. In El Mirage, where foreclosure sales make up a big portion of the market, the overall median home price is $135,000. The foreclosure resale is $133,750.
Other areas seeing the largest mix of foreclosure sales include southern Surprise, Youngtown and Avondale.
In Surprise's 85379 ZIP code, 352 resales were foreclosures and 352 were traditional resales from January through mid-September. The median price of new and resale homes in this area dropped 25.5 percent in the past year.
Youngtown's 85363 ZIP Code saw 49 percent of its 51 resales involve foreclosed homes. The area's median price for new and resale homes dropped 25.9 percent in the past year.
In Avondale, 45 percent of 742 resales were foreclosures. In the past year the city saw a 22.8 percent drop in the median price of new and resale homes.
West Valley cities seeing fewer foreclosure sales were Sun City, where just 5 percent of 339 resales were foreclosed homes, and Sun City West, where only 2 percent of 485 resales involved foreclosed homes.
The Sun City communities still have seen decline in the median price of new and used homes, but it was in the 18 to 20 percent range.
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