Foreclosures accounted for slightly more than 50 percent of recorded home resales in Maricopa and housing prices continued to fall in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to numbers released by Arizona State University’s Realty Studies on Thursday.
The data shows Maricopa that of the 705 total resales of single-family homes, 355 were foreclosure sales. The city’s 50.4 percent rate was greater than Pinal County’s 44 percent, but not quite as bad as Queen Creek, where foreclosures accounted for 55 percent of resales. The number of foreclosures sales was also down slightly from the third quarter (385) in Maricopa.
The median price of homes sold in Maricopa for the fourth quarter was $130,000, a drop of $6,175 from the third quarter and $40,000 less than in the first quarter of last year. But homes in Maricopa were selling for more than the county average ($119,000) and far greater than in most other cities in the county, including Florence ($93,000) and Casa Grande ($119,900).
“In Pinal County, there is a wide range of homes available from the listed homes to foreclosures, but a key force has been the rapidly declining prices,” Jay Butler, director of Realty Studies at ASU’s Polytechnic campus said in a statement. “Homeowners and investors are buying with the expectation of strong appreciation in the future.”
For all transactions, the median price of home sales in Pinal County has steadily eroded from $220,000 in fourth quarter 2005 to $143,100 in second quarter 2008 to $119,000 for the most recent quarter. The foreclosure median price was $126,400, while the traditional transaction was $115,000.
The Realty Studies figures didn’t include new-home sales specific to Maricopa, but in the county overall, there were 1,400 new homes sold in the fourth quarter with a median price of $159,285.
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