Governor Ducey just announced a state-wide shelter-in-place order. Let’s take a look at our Phoenix metro market update for March 2020 and see what’s in store for Arizona.
Real estate sales and the services that facilitate sales, such as title companies, inspectors and lenders, are considered “essential services”; however, this does not mean real estate sales will continue as before.
Getting buyers to homes means ignoring, for the most part, rules of social distancing, and the stay-at-home order is going to ring a more serious tone for many. Let’s see what’s happened over the past month.
As of March 30, 2020, there are just over 13,200 actively listed properties across Maricopa County–compare that to under 11,000 back in January. There are 11,035 properties under contract and since February 29, there have been 7791 sales. The average days on market for the recently sold properties was 56.
Here is a graph that shows supply v demand for February 2020 versus one year ago:
There are folks out there that really must sell and there are buyers who are in desperate need of a home–we believe that those groups are the only ones that will be active until we see COVID-19 numbers begin to decrease.
Home Financing
We’ve heard rumor that there are no VA or FHA funds available. Conventional loans are still be underwritten and funded. According to bankrate.com, a few lenders are offering 30 year mortgages at 3.625% (rates will vary depending upon your FICO score, assets, income, etc). We expect mortgage rates to stay low through the crisis and beyond–at least until markets stabilize.
In Closing
Everything is up in the air right now.
The stock market is all over the place and unemployment numbers have topped three million. There are so many factors in play and no one really knows what will happen. It could be many months before Arizona hits its peak in terms of COVID-19 cases and until we see a decline, we’ll likely see a rapid decline in real estate activity.
Thank you for reading our Phoenix metro market update for March 2020. If you have any real estate questions, please reach out.
