If you bought a home in Arizona five years ago, you’ll probably be able to get only slightly more than you paid for it if you try to sell it now.

New figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency show that the average purchase price of a home in Arizona dropped almost 20 percent in the last year. On average, that means a house that was selling for $200,000 in the first quarter of 2008 now is worth about $39,000 less.

Longer term, the agency figures the sales price of an average Arizona home in the first quarter of this year is about 14 percent higher than what it was five years ago.

The picture is a little less bleak when looking at a broader index the agency uses, which computes not only the price of homes but also the value of other homes as measured by appraisals done for refinancing. There, the combined year-over-year index is down only 13.6 percent, or a loss of $27,200 on that same $200,000 home.

And the value now is about 55 percent higher than in 2002.

The figures, prepared quarterly, may be somewhat more precise than some other indexes that look at the median sales prices of all homes sold in a given quarter. That is because the Federal Housing Finance Agency uses figures that compare only the same homes over and over, both in terms of actual sales and appraisals.

The decline in values, using both sales and appraisal figures, is not uniform around the state.

In the Phoenix metro area, which includes both Maricopa and Pinal counties, home values were down about 17.3 percent. But the numbers suggest the bottom may be near: The difference between the first quarter of 2009 and the last quarter of 2008 was just 1.3 percent.

Tucson showed a similar pattern, where the quarter-over-quarter decline was just a hair less than 1 percent. The one-year change was down 9.8 percent.

The Prescott area actually managed a small increase in home values in the last quarter.

“Our latest data are consistent with growing evidence that housing market conditions may be stabilizing in some parts of the country,” Federal Housing Finance Agency Director James Lockhart said in a prepared statement. He said future numbers may be brighter as people are able to take advantage of new stimulus programs, including a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

While the situation may be easing in Arizona, the state still finds itself near the bottom of the chart.

Nationally, the average purchase price of a home dropped only about 7.1 percent in the last year. And only three states had sharper declines than Arizona: Florida, California and Nevada.

At the other extreme, only four states showed year-over-year increases in home sale prices: Alaska, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Credits: East Valley Tribune

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 4:49 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.