This could be the year for metro Phoenix’s housing market.
Home prices are poised to recover fully from the 2007-2011 crash. All it will take is another year of steady price and sale gains like we saw in 2016.
Phoenix-area home prices climbed about 6 percent last year. The area’s median hit $244,000 in December, according to housing analyst Mike Orr’s Cromford Report.
And our current median home price is only about 6 percent off from the area’s peak of $260,000 for the boom year 2006.
We are so close. All we need is a repeat of last year for Valley home sales.
Metro Phoenix home sales ticked up enough to outpace the number of houses listed for sale during 2016. Foreclosures continued their steady fall from record levels during the crash.
And homebuilding, the slowest part of the Valley’s housing market to recover, saw an overdue double-digit increase.
A closer look at 2016's key indicators:
None of these key indicators took huge, unexpected swings during 2016, so it shouldn’t be that hard to repeat in 2017.
The recovery has been slower than most of us wanted for our home values.
But the less-frenzied pace still has the Valley winning the recovery race against other boom-and-bust cities like Las Vegas and Tampa, where home values haven’t recovered as much as in the Valley.
So let’s forget about boom and bust, and make slow and steady the new mantra for a solid housing market in metro Phoenix.
Here’s the Twitter version of Information Market real-estate expert Tom Ruff’s forecast for metro Phoenix’s housing market.
“2016 was better than 2015, 2017 should be even better,” he wrote.
Sounds to me like a forecast for the final stage in the Valley’s housing recovery.
