Phoenix Housing Market Hot… For Californians
Kyle Campos certainly does not look like a pioneer, and “go East, young man,” doesn’t have quite the same ring as the 19th century version.
But the high cost of a California mortgage made him one.
But when he transplanted his family from Santa Barbara, Calif., to a piece of the Sonora Desert three years ago, Campos accomplished something he never could have done if he’d stayed on the California coast:
He bought a house and started a business.
He unleashed a flood of family members who followed him here to the Phoenix housing market to fulfill the same thwarted dreams. First came Aaron, his brother and business partner, with wife and four children in tow.
His in-laws, who could never afford a house, came next and bought two. And last year, his mother joined them, buying a home for the first time since her divorce nearly a decade before.
“Living in Santa Barbara, you get used to nothing being under a million dollars, and a million-dollar house is really small,” Campos said.
“Here, I could build my dream house for less than $300,000. At some point, you weigh the beach versus a realistic life someplace.”
These days, that “someplace” is likely to be Maricopa County.
For the first time since Nevada became a magnet for Californians in the 1990s, low Arizona mortgage costs have made the Phoenix area the No. 1 destination for people fleeing the Golden State and its home prices.
In fact, the Arizona-bound are actually at the head of a long parade of bargain hunters marching out of expensive urban California and settling east - Riverside and San Bernardino, Calif.; Buckeye, Glendale, Phoenix.
While Arizona home mortgage costs have risen drastically in their own right, for a family starting out, they’re several times better than what California can provide.
Tax returns for 2005, the most recent data available, show that a net 11,375 households - representing nearly 29,000 people - moved from California to Maricopa County in 2004.
At the same time, a net 10,657 households with about 23,000 members moved from California to Clark County, Nev.
“Nevada home prices aren’t cheap anymore, nor are prices in Phoenix, compared to what they were. But it’s still cheap compared to California,” said R.L. Brown, publisher of the Phoenix Housing Market Letter.
“We’re averaging 9,000 Californians a month changing their (drivers) licenses to Arizona. To me that’s a phenomenal number.”
As much as California has beckoned adventurers throughout its history, the state has had an equally long tradition of defectors - in search, at least in the last generation, of destinations with fewer cars and cheaper home prices.
In the 1980s, the Pacific Northwest decried the hoards of “Californicators” who snapped up real estate and filled freeways in Starbucks’ hometown.
Since then, Las Vegas and its non-neon environs have reigned supreme - no state income tax, affordable Nevada mortgage costs. No brainer.
But then home prices in the Silver State took off like a drunken gambler’s dreams between 2003 and 2004, as the median price of a Vegas-area house jumped 40 percent, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
Phoenix started looking better and better.
February’s median home price - the level at which half of all home sales are above and half below - speaks volumes about California migration patterns.
- Los Angeles County: $528,000.
- Las Vegas area: $300,000.
- Phoenix area: $253,000.
Maricopa County, here we come.
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