2:20 PM » April Phoenix Area Home Sale Press Release
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Phoenix Region April Home Sales The median price paid for a home in the Phoenix area last month jumped to a 29-month high, rising on a year-over-year basis for the fifth month in a row. The number of homes sold fell slightly compared with both March and a year earlier as foreclosure resales and sub-$100,000 transactions dropped off sharply, a real estate information service reported. In April, buyers paid a median $142,000 for all new and resale houses and condos sold in the combined Maricopa-Pinal counties metro area. It was the highest median for any month since November 2009, when the median was $142,700. Last month's median was up 4.0 percent from March and up 18.3 percent from a year earlier, according to San Diego-based DataQuick, which tracks real estate trends nationally via public property records. The median's 18.3 percent year-over-year increase in April followed annual gains of 13.8 percent in March and 7.5 percent in each of the prior three months. Last month's median sale price stood 46.2 percent below the all-time peak of $264,100 in June 2006, but it was 20.0 percent above the median's post-peak trough of $118,347 in August 2011. To some extent, last month's relatively large year-over-year gain in the median sale price was driven by price pressures that have formed in the market as affordability-driven demand has been met with a relatively low inventory of homes for sale. But the jump in the median price also reflects a substantial drop in the share of all resales that are foreclosed properties, which tend to carry significant discounts and be concentrated in lower-cost areas. Foreclosure resales, defined as homes that were foreclosed on in the prior 12 months, fell to 26.6 percent of the resale market last month - the lowest level for any month since February 2008, when they were 22.8 percent. April's foreclosure resale level fell from 31.7 percent the month before and 50.6 percent a year earlier. The peak level for foreclosure...