In the past year or two I’ve been repeatedly asked how Foothills Lots values have faired in  comparison with those in other areas. It also raises the question of where the values are now in relation to the highs of 2006/2007. Several trends have been clear during this downturn: There has been continued demand and sales of the lower priced Foothills lots and Land (the Best values in the Best areas are always ahead of the norm);  Foothills homesites have not experienced as severe a drop in value as some other areas; there have been very few foreclosures among foothill’s subdivided parcels thus we haven’t seen whole subdivisions being dragged down as we’ve seen in areas such as Stone Canyon , Saguaro Ranch; there is at least one subdivision, Pima Canyon, that has bucked the trend and remained relatively strong thru the downturn.

I had a conversation yesterday  with  the  Assessor’s Appraiser responsible for the Foothills area. After going through numerous examples, of  vacant parcels that sold in 2006/2007 and resold in 2009/2010, a trend became clear. The staff member concluded that lot prices were off about 25% from the market highs of a couple of years ago. I think that number may be a bit conservative, but not far off.

The values of the highest end lots( those above $1 Million) have probably dropped 30+% but in general I concur with the Assessor on this. In other areas I ‘ve seen that number as high as 50 % and even 70% in some extreme examples. I’ve always thought that the most desirable locations tend to hold value more than lesser areas and I think the Foothills Lots example supports this notion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 8:10 am and is filed under News. 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.