June 12 Real Estate Market Update

 Here is our latest table of Cromford® Market Index values for the single-family markets in the 17 largest cities

Goodyear has broken the run of 8 weeks with all the 17 cities showing improvement for sellers. Goodyear is down 1% from a month ago but remains a seller's market.

A big gap has opened up between the top 12 cities, with CMIs all above 170 and the bottom 5 with CMIs below 135.

Most improved are Maricopa, Chandler, Fountain Hills and Peoria (up 17% or more). The average increase of the month is 10.9%, down from 14.8% last week.

15 cities are in seller's markets, 2 are balanced and none is a buyer's market.

The average 30 year fixed mortgage interest rate remains close to 7%, which is not popular with buyers. Several of the large-scale home builders are incenting their buyers by paying down the rate to the mid-5 area. This working well for them as the rising prices leave them plenty of room to do this. However only about 10% of new homes get listed by ARMLS. This means the relatively robust sales of new homes is not fully reflected in the CMI, which is primarily focused on the re-sale market. Volume is weak across the re-sale market, partly because of the lack of eligible buyers, but also because of the lack of motivated sellers. To compete with the new homes we have a low inventory of re-sales available, making the homebuilders even more happy.

The supply count continues to fall, despite the drop in demand, but in some cities the demand is falling fast enough to change the direction of the CMI. Over the last week, the CMI has declined in Cave Creek, Goodyear, Laveen, Litchfield Park, Surprise, Tempe, Tolleson, and most importantly, Phoenix.

We are facing a long hot Phoenix summer, but with a re-sale housing market that is showing signs of slowing down.