Housing Market in Metropolitan Phoenix Slowing Steadily

The metropolitan Phoenix housing market continues to slow at a fairly steady clip.

Prices for existing homes edged up less than 1 percent to $259,000, as 5,040 homes sold for the month of November, according to data from the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic.

The sales volume for the area was the lowest for a November since 2002.

However, the number of homes sold was a slight improvement over the 4,985 sales in October. Buyers are finally putting a dent in the area’s rising inventory. Last year, nearly 7,200 homes sold in November.

“Instead of being overactive, or no pulse, it’s running at a normal pulse,” said Jay Butler, who heads the Real Estate Center. “It’s a good, strong pulse. It’s just not the pulse people like.”

He said that sales and prices are much more sustainable than those recorded in 2005, when Arizona mortgage activity soared.

“Last year, it was like running a race,” he said.

The market for new home sales has bottomed out, experts say. In the case of existing homes, sellers have been able to get about the same price for the past several months.

But although November’s figure inched up some, the median price remains below the $263,000 that homes fetched in November 2005.

Thanks to the low cost of taking out a mortgage loan, prices have soared so fast in the area that now people are priced out of the market. In turn, a correction was inevitable.

Prices varied widely throughout the Valley. For example, the median price of a home sold in Scottsdale was $630,000, about 5.9 percent higher than the same time last year.

Meanwhile, the median price in Goodyear dropped 11.9 percent to $252,000.