Flood of home sales 3-11-15

The article, Flood of home sales may indicate Millennials diving in, from www.azcentral.com, reports that home sales across metro Phoenix are on track to jump more than 30 percent during the next few months, potentially signaling the restart of the area's stalled housing recovery, according to a new report released Friday. The number of Valley houses under contract to sell started to surge in early February, a special report from Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business indicated. The biggest increases in pending sales were for houses priced from $150,000 to $250,000 and from $250,000 to $400,000. That could signal more first-time buyers and that former homeowners who lost houses to foreclosure are purchasing again. "It's really encouraging for the housing market to see home sales climb the most at the lower end of the market," said Mike Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at W.P. Carey. "Millennials and boomerang buyers are likely behind much of the increase in sales." Less-stringent lending standards and the federally mandated cut to Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance may be attracting new buyers, especially Millennials, experts said. Valley home sales fell 14 percent last year. Housing-market watchers have said since the market started slowing in early 2014 that it would take less-stringent lending requirements and more Millennials and boomerang buyers to push home sales back up. The trend appears to be national, as pending home sales in the U.S. reached an 18-month high in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. The rising demand from younger buyers also appears to be helping Phoenix's new-home market. During the past two months, contracts to buy new houses in the region have climbed 12 percent, according to Belfiore Real Estate Consulting. "Consumers, relegated to window shopping for a new home as the economy has recovered over the last 24 months, are just starting to show their purchasing might," Arizona real-estate analyst Jim Belfiore said.

Here is the link to the entire article: http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/02/27/asu-report-look-percent-surge-home-sales/24126481/