PHOENIX (AP) — Real estate experts expect home prices in metropolitan Phoenix to continue to rise in the coming years.
The Phoenix area’s median home price has jumped by 35 percent during the past year, though price gains in recent months have been smaller than earlier this year, The Arizona Republic reported (http://bit.ly/WV6nVk ).
Recommended Stories
Several experts are looking for metro Phoenix home prices to climb more than 10 percent annually during the next three years.
Matt Widdows, CEO of Arizona’s largest residential-real-estate brokerage, HomeSmart, is bullish on a further rebound in home prices.
“I would say that in the next five to seven years, we will see (home) prices back to levels we saw in 2005,” he said. “Many (Phoenix-area) homes dropped to one-third of their value in 2005, and I have no doubt that we will be right back to those levels.”
These might sound like aggressive forecasts. But even Arizona economist Elliott Pollack, whose forecasts often are conservative, recently projected Phoenix-area home prices would climb 50 percent by 2015-16.
Metro Phoenix’s median home price is $150,000, so it would have to increase at least 11 percent annually over the next four years to reach $225,000, a 50 percent increase. In May 2005, the median existing-home price in metro Phoenix was $228,000.
Other analysts aren’t as bullish.
Mike Orr, an analyst with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, tracks home sales daily but never forecasts home prices more than a month out.
“At the moment, pricing pressure is upwards, but there is always the potential for prices to dip,” Orr said.
An unknown for the housing market is what the handful of large investors who are buying thousands of homes in metro Phoenix plan to do with them.
If they decide to sell around the same time, the supply of homes could jump, dampening prices.
Industry experts said that’s unlikely to happen, at least in the short term.
___
Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
