Phoenix housing market is 'about where it should be'

It's still better to buy a home
Renting may be cheaper in the short run, but inflation -- yes, that boogeyman – is the homeowner's friend if you stay in your home longer than 10 years.

If you bought a house in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, you were "catching a falling knife." Home values were falling. Thousands of buyers in that period spent most of the decade "upside down," meaning they owed more than they could get if they sold.

Today, whatever the angst about the current market, all those knife-catchers are sitting pretty. The upside-down years are a distant memory.

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Phoenix housing market is 'about where it should be'

from the Arizona Business Gazette, reports that despite the huge number of homes for sale in the Valley, real estate expert Jay Butler says prices remain above the national average. "The market is about where it should be, and people don't like to hear that," the director of Realty Studies at ASU said recently. Currently, the median Phoenix area home price is around $260,000, while the national median price is $219,000. Although the inventory of homes for sale has climbed to about 51,000, the Phoenix area remains one of the top 20 metro areas for a median price. Problems facing our market include buyers not being able to afford as much because of the higher prices and because skittish lenders have been tightening their guidelines. Sellers can't or won't lower their prices because they owe too much. And buyers are having problems selling their own homes.