November 03, 2007

Welcome to real estate hell - Phoenix Arizona has 20,000 empty homes for sale, with failed flippers unable to find renters now desperate to dump


But what about the 21 reasons to bank on the Phoenix Ponzi Scheme?

What about the year round golf and sports stars?

This story should remind everyone reading why you should NEVER listen to a realtor on commission. Especially the stupid ones.

Note in this article is by the Arizona Republic's "Rolodex-of-Realtors" Catherine Reagor (remember her and her incompetent bubble reporting?). And yes, she quotes a couple of ramen-eating-realtors desperately trying to spin. But now it's all just so laughable.


Of Valley homes for sale, a third sit empty - 20,000 vacant homes pushing prices lower

Vacant homes are a big reason why Valley home prices are falling.

At least one out of every three homes for sale across metropolitan Phoenix is empty, and owners are motivated to cut prices to sell.

Many empty houses are owned by investors who can't find renters and need to sell. Others are owned by people who moved to other houses in the Valley or elsewhere and can't afford two mortgages. Some empty homes for sale are new houses that home builders are offering deals on. And a growing number of vacant houses are owned by lenders that foreclosed on the properties and want to cut their losses by selling them quickly and often cheaply.

"There's a whole collection of must-sell sellers in the Valley's housing market now," said Jim Sexton, president of the Phoenix real-estate firm John Hall & Associates. "It's a great time to buy, but sellers have a lot of competition now."

50 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about the shortage of land and all that stuff?

Anonymous said...

But Greg Swann is still having a great year.

Unknown said...

Keith,
My funny story: A year ago I maxed out my credit cards for $140 000. They charge me like 29%, now. Then conservatively invested in forein markets and ..... guess what? 70% return!!! I quess I will keep it this way. Maybe one day, I retire in that Arizona golf place.
I love that Bernanke Peso guy!!!

Anonymous said...

Illegals working at Taco Bell are making more than Greg Swann this year

Anonymous said...

that paint color is uuugly.

Anonymous said...

There is a realtor on Swann's blog complaining that "people read the paper too much". (someone made a lowball offer on a property he is selling).

Anonymous said...

How does Swann have any business or does he?

Frank R said...

Many empty houses are owned by investors who can't find renters and need to sell.

Hmm, all those trolls who talk about skyrocketing rents are strangely silent....

Anonymous said...

the phoenix real estate hell is hot but its a dry heat.

Anonymous said...

Why some moron would buy a house without selling theirs first is beyond me. (why someone would buy a house now is beyond me). Where's Suzanne when you need her. Suuuuuuuuuuzzzzanne!!!! Oh nevermind, she's the scumbag that told them to buy the new house.

Anonymous said...

Frank- i have read alot of your posts and am left to wonder why are you REALLY so down on scottsdale? have you checked out P.V. or Arcadia? you think Scottsdale sucks!? your posts leave the impression that you have a class envy problem.

happy in scottsdale:-))

Anonymous said...

No wonder that house sits empty.
No light fixtures.
The layout of that particular room looks a little F’d up. The rest of the house is probably the same.
And how thick is the sand covering that cheap pergo flooring.
I’m guessing the houses in that town are all similar and over priced.

Anonymous said...

That's funny, rents are soaring up in Portland.

Anonymous said...

The one thing I am curious on, and strangely no news publisher has really picked up on it yet, is who pays the property taxes on a bank owned foreclosure?
Also we know that property taxes are not being paid by a large number of "investors" with vacant houses.

Anonymous said...

Empty homes like Greg Swann and Kendra Todd reek of desperation

blogger said...

Why do realtors always, always, always say 'it's a great time to buy' ?

Oh, that's right, 6%.

Anonymous said...

Also, big 200+ house auction on Nov 17th in Phoenix;
ushomeauction, they just did an infommercial.

I can see it now;
naive bidders being whipped up into a frenzy and paying way too much.

Anonymous said...

This was in another article on Azrepublic regarding the slowdown;

"Housing accounts for at least $1 in every $3 generated in metro Phoenix. So when home sales and building slow, the economic pain spreads everywhere. "

I assume when they say housing, they mean housebuilding. Hopefully everyone involved in the business saved their pennies since the peak in '05.

With an average of 4.000 house sales per month, it's going to take a long time to clear through that much inventory

ApleAnee said...

Anonymous said...
November 03, 2007 9:55 PM

Frank- i have read alot of your posts and am left to wonder why are you REALLY so down on scottsdale?.....your posts leave the impression that you have a class envy problem.

happy in scottsdale:-))

Frank took all of the class with him when he moved away. All you have left is this:

http://tinyurl.com/2actaj

If life is so "classy" in Scottsdale and you are so "happy" why are you here? Slumming? We are waiting for you to debauch yourselves to death and then we will move in and clean it up.

Anonymous said...

Off topic, but what ever happened to Osman? He was a regular on this forum but since the sh*t hit the fan, he has not been heard from. He was one of the better real estate trolls, not too full of himself. I miss him.

Frank R said...

Frank- i have read alot of your posts and am left to wonder why are you REALLY so down on scottsdale? have you checked out P.V. or Arcadia? you think Scottsdale sucks!? your posts leave the impression that you have a class envy problem.

anon 9:55 - actually I moved to Newport Beach, so I most defintely don't have a class envy problem ... and Scottsdale has no class, which is why I left.

BTW - I did live in Arcadia for a while and it blows Scottsdale out of the water. It's prettier, classier, and far, far friendlier. PV, you can keep, it's too ugly dusty desert for me.

Anonymous said...

Prices are still too high to be attractive in most former bubble cities of the Southwest. REO's will start to fall soon as banks don't want to end up paying the taxes.

Cow_tipping said...

Wanna bet another third are owned by liars who bought investment property and listed it as to live in for qualifying for the better deals for owner occupied houses.
Cool.
Cow_tipping.

Anonymous said...

A blind person could pick a better color. You'd have to pay me to live in a house that color.

Anonymous said...

If you think it's bad now just wait until they run out of water. They you'll not be able to give these houses away.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/31/guardiansocietysupplement.drought

Anonymous said...

"Ruprecht said...
The one thing I am curious on, and strangely no news publisher has really picked up on it yet, is who pays the property taxes on a bank owned foreclosure?"
----------------------------
Here in PA the banks pick up the tax tab on the houses they foreclose. They then don't pay any taxes for years because no one will bid, at tax sale, on a property with a lien on it.

While the government taxing authority accepts whatever is the high bid as settling the owed taxes, high bidder also inherits the mortgage. Your one dollar bid might have settled the $14,762 tax bill, but now you owe "The Bank That Cares" $780,000 on a $78,000 sh#tbox.

You live in your house, CAN'T pay the taxes: you are outta there. The bank forecloses, DOSEN'T pay the taxes: NOTHING! It's great to be the bank.

Anonymous said...

The one thing I am curious on, and strangely no news publisher has really picked up on it yet, is who pays the property taxes on a bank owned foreclosure?

Whoever owns it, pays tax. Even if they didn't want to own it. It's the law.


That's funny, rents are soaring up in Portland.


Portland is one of the few places which will be decent with $10 gasoline. It's coming within a decade, easy.

Anonymous said...

Wait until AZ runs out of water, just like is happening in GA as we speak. It's coming. Or you guys think that you can pump millions of immigrants (legal or not) every year ad infinitum without having any consequences to VERY LIMITED natural resources? GA and TN are already paying the price...NV and AZ next. Give it another couple of years and they will dry like a mofo.

Anonymous said...

Someone should find out what Swann made this year if anything

Anonymous said...

Falling rents will lead to the government reporting deflation when prices are actually rising

Anonymous said...

you guys crack me up!

here's a few things to consider re: housing in phx metro

1. southern cal will run out of water before phx does-they have been taking more than their share from the colorado for decades and the water runs THROUGH AZ!

2. phoenix does not have FIRES, MUDSLIDES, or EARTHQUAKES!

3. illegals are FLEEING az as the new year and new employment laws approach

4. as the cheap workforce leaves and the world demand for raw materiels increases (china is sucking up 50% of the WORLDS production of concrete) houses will be MORE expensive to produce not less. FACT: 2005 price per sq ft to build a 1800 sq ft house-$47
2007 price to build THE SAME EXACT THING-$70 per square.

i like to visit socal - spent july in coronado last year- but with the fucked up politics of california and illegal invasion and the natural disasters etc etc etc - i'll keep on enjoying living in scottsdale- and like it or not this city is STILL in high demand nationally - we are creating jobs, have a huge net inflow of people (legal) and californians FLOCK here everytime a natural disaster hits.

its going to take a while to absorb inventory and deal with the defaults- probably until 2010
but az will recover before las vegas and most of cali!

Anonymous said...

Yes Phoenix nothing like playing golf in 120 degree face melting heat 5 months a year.

JC said...

Why not just bulldoze them all and return the landscape to it's natural desert landscape?

Frank R said...

i like to visit socal - spent july in coronado last year- but with the fucked up politics of california and illegal invasion and the natural disasters etc etc etc - i'll keep on enjoying living in scottsdale-

For all of CA's negatives, it still beats the hell out of living in Scottsdale which is the largest concentration of rude, unhappy a-holes in the US, possibly the world. I've never met so many miserable, nasty people as I did in Scottsdale.

On politics, you are blind if you cannot see that AZ has become a blue state. At least in Orange County I'm in "American's Most Republican County" and don't have to deal with the liberal Scottsdale pansies day in and day out.

Oh yeah and my CCW here actually lets me carry into a restaurant. So much for AZ's "gun rights."

Anonymous said...

"You live in your house, CAN'T pay the taxes: you are outta there. The bank forecloses, DOSEN'T pay the taxes: NOTHING! It's great to be the bank."

So there is a lot of property taxes going unpaid on at least 20,000 houses in Phx.

I also wonder who pays the property taxes on the empty condo conversions. There are at least 25 apartment to condo complexes in Phx that got converted from mid '05 that sit half sold.

Frank R said...

Arizona politics:

Governor: Democrat
Mayor of Phoenix: Democrat
Phoenix council: Democrat majority
Mayor of Scottsdale: Democrat
Scottsdale council majority: Democrat
Scottsdale's congressman: Democrat

Shall I go on?

See my latest blog post at
www.scottsdale-sucks.com
for more....

Anonymous said...

Frank - if we could just get the californians to stop moving here we would be fine! if you know ANYTHING about az politics you know virtually ALL the dems in power are very conservative - we have some of the toughest illegal alien laws in the country, we have virtually the toughest laws on DUI and short of no gun laws we have the most lenient- machine guns, suppressers and shall issue CCW. what more can you ask for? either you have a REALLY REALLY good reason to have a carry permit OR you live in the one or two counties in all of cal. that will issue you a lic. you guys cant even buy an AR or an AK much less the MAGAZINE that goes in them- dont talk to me about how great cals gun laws are - Ronnie Barrett wont even do business with your state as in he wont service your cops guns!

as far as being a "blue" state - az went to Bush 2x! who did california vote for again?

Cal. is a beautiful place but leave out a few gems re:SoCal - how about housing that is 3-5x what it is in scottsdale? how about the fact that there are SO MANY PEOPLE in southern Cal. that you cant do ANYTHING on the weekends that does not involve fighting crowds? too many people live there bro!

AZ is the place to be if you want to be in a growing state- last 10 years we doubled cal. in job growth percentage wise (42.3-20.5)
you want to be in business? you want to be in AZ.

Anonymous said...

Frank- went to your website and looked around- dude where did this hard on for scottsdale come from? do you have a job-you know one that pays money? all this hate directed at a "PLACE" - ive lived in some pretty crappy locals but i am FAR too busy to dwell on them enough to dedicate the kinda time you give to a place you obviously have such antipathy for.

kind of a pathetic waste of time!

Frank R said...

Frank- went to your website and looked around- dude where did this hard on for scottsdale come from? do you have a job-you know one that pays money? all this hate directed at a "PLACE" - ive lived in some pretty crappy locals but i am FAR too busy to dwell on them enough to dedicate the kinda time you give to a place you obviously have such antipathy for.

No, I don't have a job, don't need one, read further into my blog. I've found that 90%+ people agree with me that Scottsdale is the rudest, nastiest, phoniest, most unhappy collection of people anywhere, so I don't know what your problem is.

AZ has the toughest illegal alien laws? Then why is it overrun with illegals? Toughest DUI laws? Yeah, and they ignore the constitution and I have 2 personal friends who got bogus DUIs in Scottsdale. It's a corrupt town with corrupt police. "Tough DUI laws" means you go to jail and have your life ruined for having 2 beers after work. That's not "tough" - that's a POLICE STATE. If that's tough, then Hitler was tough for throwing old ladies and babies into ovens. Tough, my ass.

On the CCW thing, if you live in LA, SD or SF you can't get one. Any other county including here in Orange County and it's as easy as AZ. And I get to carry wherever the hell I want as long as I don't drink, unlike AZ where my CCW permit was useless because carry is banned almost everywhere except on the street itself.

Anonymous said...

Fellow Humans, we need to work together to survive...division and nastiness offer only extinction, sooner than you may believe, if the negative culture represented here is allowed to thrive unchecked.

Best wishes and Love to all

Anonymous said...

How about an apology? I was an honest agent but because I told my clients the truth, instead of what they wanted to hear, I only lasted 2 years in the field. There are far more honest realtors than there are wise and sober buyers. America has become a nation of ignorant, materialistic, haughty children and the whole world is laughing at our current situation. It's funny because its true.

Anonymous said...

Wow, anonymous: "as far as being a "blue" state - az went to Bush 2x! who did california vote for again?"

And you're PROUD of the fact you guys voted for the moron 2x in a row?

You idiots deserve high gas prices, meth epidemic and a housing collapse

Anonymous said...

As a person who loathes bankers, developers, speculators and real estate people I can honestly say I'm enjoying the hell out of what I see going on in the business. I hope all to them lose their a$$es off. No one deserves it more than they do.

And longterm, with water sources drying up maybe one day even Phoenix will look like those abandoned Anasazi (sp?) cliff dwellings you see on the History Channel.

BTW, California gets a lot of water from the Colorado River but LA gets a lot from Sierra snow melt that runs into the Owens Valley. They're in trouble but not like Phoenix!

Anonymous said...

Get rid of the illegal Mexicans and stop jacking up the prices of homes will START to solve your problem in Phoenix. This whole country will be in the toilet shortly thanks to the morons in charge. Think prices for food and gasoline are high now, just wait - you are in for a huge shock at what awaits in the next year before the boy wonder is out of office! He must "pay back" his friends for their piddly campaign contributions. Big Oil will be out of control this winter leading everyone down the path of self-destruct. I pity people who will not have any water at any price soon. Why do peope in AZ have swimming pools wasting water? Same reason as Calif.... they are rich people and dont care about the waste. The housing market must crash out there before it levels off to normal prices. I think it will get much, much worse out there and people will be giving their homes away for pennies on the dollar soon.

Anonymous said...

To Frank in Scottsdale I have this to say to you. You are the type of mentality that really makes a big difference..... you are truly a jerk. "I don't have a job...don't need one" tells me that you are obviously independently wealthy so you haven't the faintest clue what "normal" people who have to work every day are now facing trying to make ends meet. GET A LIFE BUDDY!!!!

Anonymous said...

It hasn't even started to get bad! Just wait until mid summer in 08 when most of the ARM's are reset along with several home builders and lenders going bust! Then you may have to stay home to defend your family and property. The Bastards on Wall Street and the Central Banks are at fault.

Anonymous said...

Barnum Bailey: A sucker is born everyday. Well they have groomed a nation of suckers - willing to believe in that snake oil. Up, up and away, they say, your money will increase to the heavens.

Well the gig is almost up, you think the housing bubble is something, wait until 2008, when the first baby boomers start to collect social security - oops the money was diverted to Iraq - endless war. Well what about my social security, how do you spell work until you are really ole and gray. Caveat emptor!!!1 suckers.!!!!

Anonymous said...

My rent in Central Phoenix for a small 2 bdrm apartment increased from low 700's to low 900's per month in the last 12 months. A VERY minor part of that was a less than $5/month tax increase. I'm virtually an ideal problem-free established tenant, but I'm on a fixed income and at this rate I'll be forced out within a year. Owner will have to roll the dice with someone else who could be far worse. Bad for both of us.

Marin Records said...

Funny so many real estate pros in Phx tell me this are "always goes up in value" However when I ask for that in witing they never comply. From what I have seen this market still has a long way down to go!

Anonymous said...

"My rent in Central Phoenix for a small 2 bdrm apartment increased from low 700's to low 900's per month in the last 12 months."

How do they justify these increases, with so many empty homes on the market? There's obviously an enormous disconnect between supply and demand.

However, at some point, it seems that banks or owners will have to consider renting out these empty liabilities just to recoup basic costs and ensure that squatters and vandals don't move in.

The US economic landscape has become a twisted, grotesque characture of itself as a result of deregulation and greed run amok, and it's the ordinary working american who is paying the price.

The Wall Street boys have had a blow out party the past 7 years to which the middle class wasn't invited, but they've been left with the tab.