The latest S&P/Case-Shiller home price index is out, and Phoenix is
leading the nation again. But this time, it’s the right direction.
Phoenix-area home prices increased 1.1 percent between October and November of 2009, the highest increase of any of the U.S. metro ar-
eas tracked on the 20-city index.
Phoenix home prices were down 14.2 percent [...]

Metropolitan Phoenix’s home building market can only improve after last year’s dismal results.
The Phoenix Housing Market Letter reports 8,027 single-family, building permits were issued in the region during 2010, the lowest level in at least 20 years. In 1990, during the middle of the last real-estate led recession, there were 10,619 permits for new homes [...]

Arizona State University’s downtown Phoenix campus and Scottsdale’s Indian Bend Wash have garnered Smart Growth awards from Urban Land Institute Arizona.
The two projects were honored for being economically sound, envirnomnetally friendly and supportive of community liviblity.The awards were handed out at Urban Land’s annual forecast event Thursday.
“ASU’s Downtown Phoenix Campus has transformed Downtown Phoenix and [...]

Arizona commercial real estate veteran Pete Bolton is back in the brokerage business. He has rejoined Grubb & Ellis to lead its new metropolitan Phoenix office.
Bolton presence has been missed in the market since he left the helm of CB Richard Ellis’s Phoenix office two years ago to run his own consulting and training firm. [...]

Additional help for Arizona homeowners facing foreclosure is on the way. About $1.3 million from a consumer fraud settlement with Countrywide Home Loans is now being distributed to 12 housing non-profits across the state.
The money will go towards hiring more counselors to help homeowners facing foreclosures.
“It is our hope that these settlement funds will have [...]

Arizona will receive another $118 million in funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help neighborhoods with too many foreclosures.
The money will come in the next few months as part of the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program.
Phoenix’s share of this round of funding will be $60 million. Other recipients are the non-profit [...]

Last week, Arizona’s big real estate deals involved foreclosures on prominent developments under construction – CityNorth in Phoenix and the Centerpoint condominium towers in Tempe.
This week’s big deal is the large cash acquisition of Sun City-area medical office buildings by a Scottsdale-based investor, a transaction that conveys more confidence in the area’s real estate [...]

There’s no doubt that 2009 was a horrible year for metropolitan
Phoenix’s real estate market. What most people hope is that it
will be the worst year ever recorded, and 2010 will be better.
Here are some final figures for last year, and not all are as bad
as expected.
There were 7,723 Phoenix-area home sales recorded in December,
according to [...]

Fifty years ago, developer Del E. Webb opened his first Sun City retirement community, where what was then the northwestern fringes of Phoenix.
 Retirees were just beginning to flock to Arizona for its warm weather. The developer plan to sell 1,700 homes in Sun City in three years. Instead, Webb sold 2,000 homes the first year.
 The [...]