Welcome to my Carefree Arizona web page, this is a most interesting time for activity in our local market and as you might imagine it is better to be a Buyer than a Seller. The Carefree market has taken an up swing of 50-60% in the buble of 2005-2007 and we are now sensitive to to the adjustment that all real estate is taking, my guess is that our area will suffer a little less than some because we did not get the ride up that some did. It is important to know that a down market presents a better opportunity to upgrade from a less costly to a more costly home, the reasoning here is that the difference between any two homes will be less in a down market and more in an up market -- so it will cost less out of pocket to make the move up now. Carefree is somewhat shielded from the volatility we see across the valley in that we had no major mass new-home market like some areas and had few investor/speculators and so our neighborhoods are not inundated with lender/bank owned properties. Because of this we should probably come out of the stress sooner than other areas and our prices will not trend as far down, also our area tends to be more affluent and our property owners have more staying power than average. A major chink in this theory is that it is unknown yet how many 'strategic foreclosure' homes are going to come on the market because there may be a rush to be the first to get relief and not be the  last one out to turn off the lights -- this could cause more homes than normal to be in a 'distressed' state, particularly in the higher priced spread. My guess is there will be some sort of Government intervention to slow this down once the powers to be can be made aware of what is happening and it will probably have the same low success rate as the other programs because of the layer of complexity that comes with fixes.

That being said, we do have some interesting properties on the market now, our prices are as good as I can remember in a while and this is probably as good a Buyers market as I will see for some time to come (I don't have that much left). A normal market for us is 60-70 homes, we now are running 75-85, so our inventory is about where it should be but 20% of those are distressed which is not healthy.

My card above is linked to DPR's home page, and diamond below is where you may look at the offerings on the MLS at your leisure -- THANKS  -- for stopping by. ------  Click on Pete's Page above to see more information on the properties below.