Arizona Real Estate

The Wall Street Journal recently ranked the desert airport the best in the nation among large airports. To determine this, it used 14 different measures within three categories (convenience, reliability and value) and surveyed more than 2,500 subscribers.

Some highlights that helped the airport take the top spot include short taxi-to-takeoff times, which improves reliability; fast WiFi; high-rated restaurants on Yelp which include local faves like Matt’s Big Breakfast, Four Peaks Brewery, Barrio Café and more; and proximity and ease of use to and from downtown Phoenix.

Other features that the more than 120,000 daily passengers can enjoy at America’s Friendliest Airport include award-winning shopping, one of the largest airport art programs, ability to check security wait times, a dog therapy and volunteer program, pre- and post-security nursing stations, pet parks at all terminals, an urgent care facility and more.

Recent updates to the airport that are making it even better include modernizing Terminal 3 which includes a new South Concourse with shops, local restaurants and customer amenities. This year, the terminal will debut a renovated North Concourse. Other upgrades include an extension of the PHX Sky Train to the Rental Car Center and an eight-gate concourse for Southwest Airlines at Terminal 4.

For more information, visit skyharbor.com

Article from: SUZANNE KOCH, JANUARY 6, 2020 – ARIZONA FOOTHILLS MAGAZINE

This coming year the housing market will be defined by 3 things- inventory, interest rates, and appreciation.  But the biggest issue the housing market will face in 2020 is an inventory shortage.  There aren’t enough homes on the market for buyers, especially on the lower end of the market. This is a topic that has come up frequently within the past several months.

Based on what is forecasted, we know that interest rates are projected to remain low and that appreciation is expected to continue as we move into 2020.  Additionally, the upcoming election will provoke many unique perspectives on the health of the US housing market. The challenge will be understanding what is actually happening and how you can best position yourself if you are thinking of buying or selling your home.

Here are several perspectives to consider on the inventory issue facing housing next year:

According to realtor.com:

“Despite increases in new construction, next year will once again fail to bring a solution to the inventory shortage that has plagued the housing market since 2015. Inventory could reach a historic low as a steady flow of demand, especially for entry level homes, and declining seller sentiment combine to keep a lid on sales transactions.”

Diana Olick at CNBC:

“Inventory has been falling annually for five straight months, after it recovered slightly toward the end of last year, due to a spike in mortgage rates. Rates began falling again by spring of this year. Homebuilders have been increasing production slowly, but it’s not enough to meet the increasingly strong demand.”

George Ratiu, Senior Economist with realtor.com

“As millennials — the largest cohort of buyers in U.S. history — embrace homeownership and take advantage of this year’s unexpectedly low mortgage rates, demand is outstripping supply, causing inventory to vanish. The housing shortage is felt acutely at the entry-level of the market, where most millennials are looking to break into the market for their first home.”

Bottom Line

The most important thing you can do is understand what is happening in your local market by connecting with a real estate professional.  You may not be able to avoid some of the issues brought on by low inventory, but you can be educated and prepared.

www.keepingcurrentmatters.com

A business-friendly environment, plentiful job opportunities and affordable cost of living have pushed Phoenix to the top of the list of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Newly released Census data for city population growth shows that the South and West continue to have the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Phoenix placed No. 1 on the list with an increase of 25,288 new residents between 2017-2018.

Phoenix remains the fifth most-populous city in the nation with a population of 1,660,272. Rounding out the top five cities with the largest population increases were San Antonio, experiencing an increase of 20,824; Fort Worth, Texas (19,552); Seattle (15,354); and Charlotte, North Carolina (13,151).

Affordable housing, new business formations and job creations are luring Millennials to Phoenix, says Eric Jay Toll, communications manager for community and economic development for the City of Phoenix.

The Great Recession was a wake-up call for Phoenix. Service-sector jobs in hospitality, retail and construction were hit particularly hard. The downturn accelerated the growth of a strong technology-based market in the last decade that has revitalized the metro area’s economy. For example, bioscience and healthcare are big fields here. The workforce in bioscience increased by over 100,000 people from 2007, a near doubling of the manpower.

“We’ve been adding a lot of jobs in the advanced industries, manufacturing, business and financial services, technology, bioscience and healthcare,” says Toll. “Those jobs tend to pay higher salaries, they are recession-resistant, and they now make up close to 60% of the metro area workforce. Before the recession in 2007, they only made up 48% of the Phoenix metro workforce.”

The promise of good jobs and good pay has attracted a diverse group of skilled professionals primarily 25 to 45 years old, many of whom are from other states or countries. It’s the largest age group moving in, based on 2017 data.

“The change in our workforce has made the market really attractive to people from outside the area,” Toll explains. “Since the 2010 census, we’ve added around 680,000 new people to the population, and 385,000 of those came from outside the area, around the United States. And about another 180,000 came from foreign countries. The largest immigrant group into the Phoenix area has been from Asia, and Latin America is second. Technology and bioscience jobs are drawing them in.”

Many entrepreneurs are creating businesses and helping revitalize the economy. Toll says the Kauffman Foundation has rated Phoenix as one of the top metro areas for startups and entrepreneurships for at least the last four years.

“There are a number of fields that entrepreneurs are going into,” explains Toll. “We have a lot of bioscience startups. That’s because of an investment that Phoenix and our partners have made into what is called the Phoenix Biomedical Campus.”

One of Phoenix’s partners is the Translational Genomics Research Institute. TGen is a Phoenix-based nonprofit organization dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life-changing results. It is affiliated with City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases.

Phoenix and its partners, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and TGen, have invested $500 million into developing the Phoenix Biomedical Campus.

“We have 10,000 science professionals who work in that area now, which is located in the downtown campus,” says Toll. “We have commitments in the pipeline for development of new biomedical and primary healthcare facilities that have a value of $3.5 billion and will bring into play over 4.1 million square feet of facilities, and it’s over the next two years. To put that in perspective, when I say primary bioscience and healthcare, I’m talking about research facilities, educational facilities and hospitals. I’m not counting urgent-care clinics, medical office buildings or doctors’ offices.”

Toll says Phoenix benefits from reasonable taxes and a stable business environment. Downtown Phoenix is home to more than 300 technology companies in 2019 compared with 67 in 2012. Metro Phoenix also has benefited significantly from the growth in the financial services sector.

“In financial services, we’ve got American Express, including their technology center, Discover, USAA, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Nationwide Financial, Allstate, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, PayPal, Paychex, Northern Trust Bank and Quicken Loans,” says Toll. “They all have huge offices, some with thousands of employees in each office.”

Vanguard uses its Scottsdale, Arizona, facility as a mirror headquarters when weather conditions shut down its main headquarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

“A lot of companies are looking at Phoenix because we have no natural disasters, no earthquakes, no wildfires, no tornadoes,” explains Toll, jokingly adding, “We don’t have natural disasters unless you consider summer heat.”

Phoenix has more to offer beyond golf courses, including museums, city parks, hiking and mountain biking trails, major league sports teams and performing arts venues.

“We get a big influx of people after a bad winter, and I think we’re seeing that this year,” says Toll.

Phoenix is one of the few major metro areas where an average single wage, as opposed to total household income, buys an average home. Compared with many other major U.S. cities, housing is relatively affordable in the Phoenix metro area, which is luring a growing number of new residents, especially Californians. Demand for apartments, however, is outpacing supply, which is pushing up rental prices.

“Many of the buyers I work with are moving away from expensive places in California to escape high taxes, traffic and natural disasters,” says Phoenix-area Redfin real estate agent Van Welborn. Vincent Shook, another Phoenix Redfin agent adds:  “When a California resident visits Phoenix and sees how much more home they can afford here, it really gives them something to think about. Plus, Phoenix property taxes are just so much lower.”

“We’re starting to get significant high-rise developments in Phoenix with multiple-use retail on the ground floor,” says Toll. “Last summer, at one point we had more cranes over downtown Phoenix than they did in downtown Los Angeles. We have eight more high-rise buildings that will be breaking ground in downtown Phoenix before the end of this year. That will bring the total to 19 multifamily developments that have been built or under construction in a 24-month window. During the recession, we didn’t have any multifamily development. We went almost 10 years without any new major apartment buildings. So there’s big demand. When these new developments open up downtown, they are beating their occupancy projections.”

Frank Nothaft, chief economist at Corelogic, says the Census report is consistent with the trends the real estate data and analytics provider has seen in housing activity with the largest number of new homes built in the South and West.

“Job opportunities, a low cost of living and warmer weather are attractions,” says Nothaft.  “For instance, across metropolitan areas, the largest number of new-home sales and the greatest increase in sales activity occurred in the South and West.  The Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix metropolitan areas topped the list of new single-family building in 2018 with each averaging more than 1,500 new sales per month.  All four of these metros have low unemployment rates and employment growth that exceeded the national gain.”

Phoenix is also seeing strong growth in residential infill development. “Parcels of land that have been undeveloped for decades are now starting to come out of the ground,” says Toll.

Originally published in Forbes