Homes for Under $25,000 ??

Buy a Valley home for under $25,000?

(map courtesy of FlexMLS. Click to enlarge, use browser’s back button to return)

The map above shows the homes (single family detached only) in the greater Phoenix area, with list prices of $25,000 or less, that sold between March 25 and April 25 of this year. Each blue marker is a sold home.

There were 190 of them. One hundred ninety houses that were listed for $25,000 or less sold in the past 30 days!

Only 2% were not lender-owned. Two-thirds of these homes sold above list price.

I thought it might be interesting to see the pattern of homes sold in this price range over the past few months. It was.

December 2008 – 37 homes sold w/ list prices under $25,000
January 2009 – 48 sales
February 2009 – 87 sales
March 2009 – 168 sales

Seems like a pretty clear upward trend. I can hardly wait to see the April month-end numbers.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the price spectrum …

(Map courtesy of FlexMLS. Click to enlarge; use browser’s back button to return)

Here’s a map of the homes (again, single family detached only) currently for sale with list prices of $1,000,000 or more. There are 3,107 of them. Only 52 are lender owned. In other words, almost 98% of these homes are not lender owned.

Number sold in past 30 days? One.

In the previous 30 days, 63 homes with a list price of $1M or more were sold. The month before that? Fifty-four sales in this price range.

That’s a microcosm of the Valley’s real estate market this spring. Bank owned homes at the low end of the price range are selling, and fast. The luxury market is dead on it’s feet. Homes in the middle are muddling through. I promise to find and post some stats on the muddling middle very soon.

Heather Barr is a Realtor and a happy workaholic. She eats more than someone her size ought to be able, and is a runner as a consequence. Her TiVo's full of spy thrillers, police procedurals and Whedonesque sci-fi.