You made the papers. You are mentioned in the Northwest Explorer article  . Here is a post about it.

Nanovation is correct about timing to sell your home. I don’t think you can wait a year carrying two mortgages. It does look like values will continue to appreciate in 2007. The appreciation for 2006 was somewhere around 16%.

But has we said earlier, you are in a worst case situation with the builder offering incentives for new homes that make it impossible for you to compete in the resale market.

As nanovation says, “don’t dispair”.

Don’t worry about the lack of activity the last couple of months and don’t drop your prices in order to just take a loss to get out. You were just trying to sell at a bad time of year. Raise your prices back up and wait for the Feb-Aug time frame.

As a point of reference, my house is priced at $334,900 and I had very little activity until this week when I got an offer for $330,000. As I thought the offer over I read the latest forecast for Tucson. Tucson is forecasted to appreciate 13.5% in 2007! See the report at http://www.arizonataxliens.com/news/arizona-real-estate-2007-forecast.php

To further support that, this week I read in the paper that they’re going to build homes on Sentinel Peak (A-Mountain) starting at $300,000 and going up to $1 million!!!

Now I’m thinking about just pulling my house off the market for a year so I can really cash in!

So, in summary, don’t dispair, you just tried selling at the wrong time. Sell in Feb-Aug or better yet, just wait for the $1 million homes to go in and then sell

We were talking about your situation and went ahead and did the research here are Barbara’s findings.

“In order to resale your home in a market with huge builder incentives, you have to be priced to compete with the builder. The builder just sold your floorplan with a $60,000 incentive, which put it at $94.86 per square foot!

I would recommend a lease with the option to buy. This would be more attractive than a straight out rental. I do not know what your mortgage payment is, but rentals are going between $1,100 to $1,400 per month in the Starr Pass Heights neighborhood. I hope this helps.

Feel free to contact me with any and all questions.”

John, again have a good day with your family tomorrow.

You have been caught in the worst case situation for the Tucson housing market. We have enough information to analyze the local market for your home. We will do that in the next couple of day and get in contact with you by email.

Since it is Christmas eve we are trying to spend time with our family today and tomorrow. I wanted you to know we aren’t blowing you off.

We will try and help you in any way we can, and we don’t do this for money, we do it because we can. We started this blog to provide information about the Tucson RE Market for buyers and sellers.

John, have a good Christmas, we will get back to you this week. May next year be better for you and your family.

Did you see the graphic on this post? What is coming down is asking price. Sale prices are going up over last year as a whole.

Houses in general aren’t coming down by $100,000 for sale price. The homes I mention in this post were way over priced by their owners. One of those homes I mentioned was priced $200,000 over what they paid for it a year earlier. Expecting to profit $200,000 on a $300,000 home after one year is unrealistic.

Certain builders are deeply discounting the price to move them off the books before year end. Some of this is due to speculators walking away from their money down and leaving builders with a lot of unsold inventory.

This post is about the general trends in the Tucson Housing Market. Specifics on New Construction are different from Resale. One area of Tucson is different from another. Context is very important, if you read this and other post on this blog we try to provide insight into all of these aspects of Tucson real estate.

You are right about the foreclosures and deliquencies yet to come. Right now we don’t know what kind of impact that is going to have on the Tucson Market. All Real Estate is local, a house on one side of a street will sell for a higher price than one on the other side depending on the neighborhood those homes might be in.

If there are a lot of foreclosures in a neighborhood it will drastically effect the prices of the other homes located near by. But 10 foreclosures in West Tucson won’t effect the prices in East Tucson.

As to your statement “The speculators are leaving so only the locals will be left to buy”

First, the speculators all left a year ago Novemeber, I’m glad you called them speculators and not investors like so many have. The speculators are the ones that can really do a lot of damage to a marketplace. They drive prices way up, and sometimes they make money and sometimes they loose a lot, either way, speculators hurt real estate markets.

Second, only locals left to buy, in a lot of locations that might be true, but not in Tucson, we are a retirement and second home city. Many of the people buying homes are coming from other parts of the country where they sold their home for $700,000 and can buy a home equal to what they had for $400,000 in Tucson. During the next 10 years we are projected to add 33,000 people a year. As a part of that figure many are going to be Boomers either retiring, or buying second homes for the winter and as investments.

I purchased the 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 2 story, attached 2 car garage, 2530 sq ft house with over $50,000 in upgrades in the Starr Pass Heights development next to A-Mountain for $300,000 in Nov 2005. Realtor advice was to price it at $375,000 but I decided $349,000 was a better idea. We’re now down to $289,000 and I’m definitely going to lose $30,000+.

We hold open houses and no one shows up. We get 2 visitors a week, but no offers. We advertise like crazy, but without much response. I don’t know what to do next. Keep it at the insanely low price where I’m losing my shirt and wait for a buyer to come around? Try to find a renter and wait out this downturn (5-10 years?)?

Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John

Chris