]Inside Tucson Business
Real estate people in the Tucson region point to the Phoenix metro area as the leader when it comes to trends in Arizona. If that’s the case, the metrics now say residential land and housing markets in that market have turned the corner and are poised for sustained improvement.
Key to that point is that in the past two years the Phoenix metro area has regained 29 percent — 66,500 of the 228,000 — jobs lost during
the Great Recession. Significantly, the year-over-year growth rate in the construction sector is about 5,000 jobs.
Land Advisors Organization, which specializes in selling large tracts of land, is forecasting that building permits in the Phoenix area will continue going upward. The low was 6,822 permits in 2010, which increased to 7,204 in 2011 and to 11,852 last year. This year, the firm is forecasting the number of permits in Phoenix will grow to 16,000 then 26,000 in 2014, 30,000 in 2015 and 35,000 in 2016, a number that puts the Phoenix market back to about where it was in 2000 when 34,232 permits were issued.
Of particular interest to Land Advisors Organization, the company says land transaction volume in metro Phoenix has mushroomed over the past three years, doubling from $700 million in 2010 to more than $1.4 billion last year.
The company says the level of distress in the Phoenix market has diminished due to acquisitions from investors, developers and home builders.
According to a MetroStudy of the market, there are about 37,000 conventional single-family home finished lots available in all of metro Phoenix, representing a supply of less than two years.
