Greeting From Phoenix Arizona!

Greetings from Phoenix, Arizona!

I’m Jay Thompson, a Phoenix real estate agent and the author of The Phoenix Real Estate Guy blog. Why am I here? Where has Teresa gone? All this and more may be running through your head right now. Rest assured, Teresa is fine, in fact, she’s on MY blog right now as we’re participating in the First Yankee Blog Swap!

I’d like to take just a little bit of your time to tell you a few things about Phoenix, and our real estate market. We get a lot of winter visitors from the St. Paul area, so it’s entirely possible some of you may know more about Phoenix than I do!
If my typing is poor, I apologize in advance. My fingers are frozen. We had a cold front blow through yesterday, and the high today will only be 58 degrees! It *may* even get down to freezing tonight! Brrrrr… time to break out the parkas, mittens and hats. I know you folks in St. Paul can’t relate to our chilly conditions. Hopefully next week we’ll be back to our normal winter highs in the 70s. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist…)

The real estate market in Phoenix has gone CRAZY in the last couple of years. In January of 2004, the median sales price of a 3 bedroom home was $145,000. In January 2005, it was $179,900, and by August 2006, the median sales price had climbed to $254,900 — an increase in home value of over 75% in a little over 2.5 years! What fueled this explosive increase was a combination of population growth and real estate investors (mostly from California).

Prices have declined slightly since the big run-up, but they are holding steady. Our housing inventory went from a meager 3,402 active listings in January 2005 to a bloated 44,562 in October of this year. Inventory seems to be dropping now, but that may be due to the typical seasonal slowdown this time of year.

Now is a great time to buy in Phoenix. The price declines have begun to level off (and are still *significantly* higher than 2 years ago) and there are a lot of great homes to chose from. New home builders tended to over-build in the boom of last year and are offering significant incentives to buyers – free upgrades, free swimming pools, thousands in credits, you name it. It’s a buyers market here.

Our lovely city has a lot to offer. Phoenix averages 296 days of sunshine a year! There are over 200 golf courses in the immediate area. We have professional sports teams — Diamondbacks baseball, Phoenix Suns basketball, Cardinals football and we even have a NHL Hockey team, the Phoenix Coyotes. And of course Arizona State University, the largest college (by enrollment) in the country is located in Tempe, AZ.

In addition to everything Phoenix has to offer, there’s also the rest of the great state of Arizona. Many people think the only thing here is sand, cactus and scorpions. But did you know that Arizona is home to the largest stand of Ponderosa pines in the United States? Did you know that during the winter, you can leave your Phoenix home and its 70 degree weather and be snow skiing in less than two hours? Arizona is a very diverse state with something to offer virtually everyone.

I’ll close with a few more "fun facts" about Phoenix:

• The highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix was 122 degrees on June 26, 1990. We joke about the "dry heat", but trust me, 122 is HOT, dry or not! The average number of days per year with a high over 100 is 89, but in 1989, there were 143 100 degree days! (More triple digit trivia)

• The lowest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix was 16 degrees on January 17, 1913. (It rarely gets down to 32 in the city proper. Outlying areas will usually have 5 or 6 nights of freezing weather a year.)

• Our average annual rainfall is 7.2 inches, with most of that coming during the summer monsoon months. The last recorded snowfall in Phoenix was in 1998, there was no accumulation.

• South Mountain Park covers almost 17,000 acres, making it the largest city park in the world.

• A saguaro cactus will take between 50 and 100 years to grow an arm. The saguaro cactus flower is the official state flower of Arizona. They commonly live for 200 years.

• Arizona once had a navy consisting of two boats on the Colorado River. They were used to prevent California from encroaching on Arizona territory. (Many wanted to re-instate the Arizona Navy last year to stop all the real estate investors!)

I hope you’ve enjoyed your little virtual trip to Phoenix! And I appreciate Teresa swapping blogs with me for the day. I don’t know much about St. Paul, but I sure know which Realtor I’d use if I needed one there!

Snow on the Superstition Mountains, just outside Phoenix. March 2006

Please visit the other Yankee Blog Swap participants!

Transparent Real Estate’s Pat Kitano vs. Zillow’s Drew Meyers