COLLIERS INTERNATIONAL REPORTS ON VALLEY'S FUTURE

Report shines a light on future development trends
from the Business Journal of Phoenix, reports that Colliers International released a forecast on what the Valley will look like in the year 2020. Highlights of the 13-year forecast include:

§ About 50 percent of the growth will be in the West Valley, where developers are master planning more than 50 square miles west of the White Tank Mountains.
§ Downtown Phoenix and the area near 24th Street and Camelback Road will continue to be the locations of choice for Class A office space in the future. But Class A development also will continue to evolve into the North Scottsdale Airpark and Deer Valley areas, around the Glendale sports complexes.
§ Interstate 17 is a corridor of infill opportunities. Older, existing products that no longer are efficient or functional will be torn down or remodeled into new products that serve the needs of the market.
§ Williams Gateway may well become the East Valley's version of Southern California's Inland Empire, an area that boasts one of the most robust economies in the United States. Many investors have begun to invest billions of dollars on this very idea.

Paper Money, a real estate bubble blog, has built a tool to create custom charts that display home-price changes, based on Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home prices indices.
Users of the new tool can select one or more metro areas that are followed by the indices and a specific time period to view how home prices have risen or fallen over time.

West Valley to mirror North Scottsdale
from the Arizona Republic, also reports on Colliers International's report and has high expectations for the Southwest Valley. "The nine-mile corridor along the I-10 from Loop 101 to the Loop 303 will resemble the current image of North Scottsdale, with high-end retail, power centers, Class A office buildings and high-end demographic housing," the report said. A section of the report on retail growth focuses on Buckeye. It notes the huge area that Buckeye has annexed and says that 25 percent of all new homes in the Valley will be built in the town.

Most bloggers who've been around the block for at least eight months or so will eventually come to ponder this question: Where will all of this blogging stuff go? Here are Inman News' Matt Carter's 10 predictions on the future of real estate blogging:
1. The number of real estate bloggers will multiply tenfold in 2007 from last year.
2. More mortgage brokers will team up with agents on collaborative blogs.
3. Natural selection will rule -- great bloggers will rise, others will fade out.
4. Bloggers Connect will be the largest blogging event for real estate yet (shameless plug, sorry).
5. The blogging community will give voice to those in the industry who previously didn't have one -- making them a force to be reckoned with. This has already happened, but will grow stronger this year. The open dialogue will spark change the industry has never before seen.
6. The National Association of Real Estate Bloggers will form.
7. The National Association of Realtors will create a blogging designation (CREB for "Certified Real Estate Blogger") to get in on the trend.
8. At least one among us will publish a memoir about blogging.
9. A sensational TV program about real estate bloggers will debut.
10. The ultra-successful bloggers will drop all other marketing and lead generation channels in favor of blogs.

An artistic depiction of a bustling city populated by Web site-branded shops.

Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker from SA for 4/2