In light of the pandemic, and the lack of group activities or events, here are some links that we hope will be helpful to you as we struggle through this most unusual summer.

If you missed our last list, see here.

Stay safe. Stay healthy!

1) Voting. Well, if you did not expect me to add early voting to my list of October News and Events, you don’t know me too well. It is too late for you to register to vote for the election if you did not do so by midnight on October 5th. But, if you have, put these date in ink on your calendar. Also, have a look at my analysis of the facts and fictions around voting fraud.

2) Affordable Loans. My friend and former chairman of the Phoenix Black Chamber of Commerce, Kerwin Brown, has built a new model to help people with low-dollar loans, without the predatory loan-sharking of the payday loan and auto title loan industry. Further still, he has designed a system through with the borrower will likely come out the other end of the process with a better understanding of personal finance than when they came in. The UPI Loan Fund matches borrowers with mentors in order to get a loan. That personal touch helps create the foundation for successful lending.

3) Sustainability Business Education. Local First Arizona does a better job of representing the local businesses of Arizona than any chamber of commerce I’ve ever seen. Here’s another way they do. They created the Scale Up business education program, which teaches small business owners about sustainability topics in the context of Arizona, specific sustainable actions they can take, and how to make these efforts cost-effective. They are taking applications now for their second cohort. Don’t miss the opportunity.

4) Wild Rising. Desert Botanical Garden’s current art exhibition, “Wild Rising” by Cracking Art,  traveled all the way from Milan. This installation of more than 1,000 animal sculptures made from colorful and recyclable plastic is on display throughout the garden through Nov. 8, 2020. General admission is $25, with youth ticket prices available. They are open from 7am to 8pm.

5) Maria Hupfield at the Heard Museum. This solo exhibition of Canadian / Anishinaabek artist Maria Hupfield will feature more than 40 works by the conceptual performance artist. The exhibition, curated by Heard Museum Fine Arts Curator Erin Joyce, will take place over several exhibition spaces and range in content from performance, sculptural installation, video, and document.

6) Cruising the Horizon presents work from several visionary U.S. based artists who explore the theme of futurity, a reference to future imaginings, beings, and ways of existing. Futurity is explored through intersecting elements of space and time with an emphasis on body and materiality. These elements formulate visions of the future where black, brown, immigrant, queer, and Trans realities are at the center.

7) Haunted Phoenix Ghost Tour. Join Marshall Shore, Arizona’s Hip Historian, for a walking tour of historic and ghostly haunts in downtown Phoenix. This tour will be cohosting by Debe Branning, director of Arizona’s “MVD Ghostchasers”, author of several ghost books on Arizona’s haunts, and has appeared on the Travel Channel on an episode of “Ghost Stories.”

For our October listing update, see our efficiency condo at the Embassy Condominiums at 4th Ave and McKinley. It has some of the best views of downtown and South Mountain. This 720 square foot, 1br/1ba property is listed below comps.

See our listings page for more.

The Embassy Condos are a well-known mid-century property that serves as a lobby-secured, easily accessible and conveniently located community with a unique second-floor pool and shaded parking.

The owner has priced this property very aggressively, leaving plenty of room for renovation. Properties in the same building with these views, when renovated, are going for $60,000 more.

There is a tenant in place until the end of the year, so that leaves room for income while you plan renovations, if you choose that option. After all, who wants to do renovations in the summer?

In the next month, we expect to add to our September listings a 4br/2ba, 2227sf home in Ahwatukee. The owner is completing renovations currently. With inventory in short supply, especially in that area of town, we expect this home to move quickly.

For this October listing update, I also want to give you a preview of listings to come. We expect to have a 3br/2ba home in North Central in January, once it has completed renovations. We are also working with owners of a property in the Encanto-Palmcroft neighborhood, which is under-going extensive renovations.

If you are thinking of renovating and selling your property, call us at 602-456-9388. We can help you plan to stand out in this market.

Donna Reiner, a local historian and a good friend of Get Your PHX, has written many articles over the years for the Arizona Republic and others about Phoenix history and memorials. This month, she tells us about college sports in the early, when Phoenix was just a little speck of a town.

We use her services when we list properties of historic significance to help us tell the stories behind the homes.

We are happy that Donna is allowing us to re-publish some of her articles on a monthly basis. If you or your business ever needs a historian, let Donna know at laydeescholar “at” hotmail.com.

In 1910, there were limited options for higher education in the greater Phoenix area. Tempe Normal focused on training teachers but even Tempe was a distance to travel especially considering the potential wet river crossing (the Tempe Bridge was completed in 1931). And the University of Arizona in Tucson proved to be too far for many students as well as costly.

The Phoenix Union High School District, in response in part to all the returning veterans from WWI, decided to provide an opportunity for higher education. And so, Phoenix Junior College opened its doors September 13, 1920, sharing the facilities of Phoenix Union High School on East Van Buren. The college classes and students had to work around the schedule of the high school which made for interesting days.

As the popularity of this higher education site quickly grew (it was free to all Phoenix Union High School and some Federal Indian School graduates), it created a need for more buildings. And the community and high school responded overwhelmingly to that need in supporting bond elections. First the high school district purchased a building, Cottonwood Court. But the enrollment increased again and a new two-story building arose by Montgomery Stadium.

Believe it or not, sports very quickly became a part of the college life. The campus had team men’s sports starting in 1922. It fielded a rifle team, track and field, and football beginning that year. Speaking of football, back in the 1920s, it was a far different sport. Uniforms and helmets were not what they are today. And the fields might be more dirt than grass. The school’s first homecoming was just nine years after the doors open, Oct. 1929. Sadly football is no longer a part of the sports schedule at Phoenix College.

Men’s basketball was in full swing by 1923. In the early days of Phoenix College, comparable college teams did not exist. So, the men’s team had the opportunity to play four-year college teams from the likes of the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California! Yes, for a mere 50 cents you could have seen Phoenix College trounced 39-9 by the Trojans at the PUHS gym back on December 17, 1928. By 1927, the college was fielding men’s teams in baseball, volleyball, and tennis.

Women’s athletic teams also began in 1922 with basketball. Did you know that there were different rules for women’s basketball? Yes, the court was divided in two different sections and the players had to stay in their section except for the roving center. Now that the dribble was once again allowed, whew, but a team only received one point for a two-handed overhead field goal. Thank goodness all that craziness is now passé.

As we begin the vote-by-mail process in Arizona, I need to address the facts and fiction about voting.

In addition to being a realtor, I have worked in public policy for over 20 years, both as an elected official and on campaigns. In that time, I’ve worked to combat voter suppression, to make voting safe and accurate, and to make congressional and legislative districts more competitive. I served as a witness in a case that fought legislation that came from the Arizona legislature, which made it harder for people, particularly in rural Arizona, to vote.

One thing I can tell you is that claims that voter fraud is rampant are greatly exaggerated. There can be only one reason to exaggerate these claims so dramatically. It is meant to call in to question the results of any election in order to remain in power.

If you’d like an in-depth analysis of how this is done, why and what affect it could have on the 2020 election, read this article from the Atlantic Monthly.

If you’d like a funnier version of it, that basically covers the same themes, watch the great John Oliver explain it all. Caution: course language.

A good source of original research about this topic is the Brennan Center for Justice, which has researched elections for decades. They have many studies, which you can access here. I recall this eye-opener report from 2014, which showed that there were only 31 credible cases of voter fraud out of 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.

On top of that, there is a difference between voter fraud (in which a person who should not vote votes) and registration fraud (in which a person who should not be registered to vote attempts to do so).

In both cases, the numbers are small –and many cases result from simple confusion or are caught before harm is done. Still, the president an his allies conflate the two so they can sew fear.

Even the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s study of voting had a hard time demonstrating large numbers of cases of voter fraud, showing about 1,300 cases (which were even questionable) and certainly not the millions of cases that the president claimed. Here is their take on their report, as well as reporting about it and finally the Brennan Center analysis of the Heritage report.

The same can be said for reports of problems with mail-in ballots. You can debunk that myth here and sort out the facts and fiction yourself.

Luckily, the malicious efforts like those detailed in the Atlantic article may not be likely in Arizona, since we’ve had a longer history of successful vote by mail than other states. In the Atlantic article, there is evidence that the president intends to claim that vote by mail ballots are fraudulent as a way to claim that he won on election night with people who went to the polls, but was “cheated” out of that win by a flood of fraudulent vote by mail ballots the next day.

Not only is this immoral and unethical, but it could lead to violence, death and the destabilizing of our democracy even further.

This tactic is easier in states where vote by mail ballots are not counted until election night. In Arizona, the vote by mail ballot counting begins early enough that they are reported along with the day-of poll voting.

Regardless, it is important to know these crucial voting deadlines.

If all of the facts and fiction of elections fraud seems overwhelming to you, the best course of action is to simply vote. If you don’t feel comfortable mailing your ballot, you can drop it off to the post office directly or you can carry it in to a polling place. Don’t forget to sign it!

Regardless of how you vote, you need to know that our system of voting is safe and accurate. We all deserve that.

This October Market Update finds us with more listings coming on the market, but not enough to affect the supply in any significant way. So, don’t expect prices to drop as a result.

Plus, if you are thinking of listing, you are still in a good place to do it.

Here are some take-away’s from the Cromford Report’s analysis as we look toward the October market.

• Active Listings in September numbered 8,101 versus 13,755 last year – down 41.1% – but up 0.9% from 8,028 last month
• Pending Listings: 7,999 versus 6,011 last year – up 33.1% – and up 1.4% from 7,892 last month
• Monthly Sales: 9,667 versus 8,022 last year – up 20.5% – and up 4.9% from 9,213 last month
• Monthly Average Sales Price per Sq. Ft.: $198.68 versus $169.60 last year – up 17.1% – and up 1.9% from $194.98 last month

The flow of new listings was strong throughout September, with roughly 17% more listings posted than in September 2019. However this did not result in much change to the available supply.

With the chronic shortage of re-sale homes, many buyers are turning to new-builds. Here they will not face multiple offers, but they may well find some builders are not accepting contracts except for homes that are near completion. The reason is that prices are climbing steeply and some developers do not want to tie themselves to a fixed price until the home is almost complete. The builders are experiencing an extreme seller’s market and buyers (and their agents) are likely to feel a little less appreciated than usual.

The reason that available supply is not increasing, despite the large increase in new listings, is that demand refuses to die down. It is unusual for the number of listings under contract to be higher on October 1 than September 1, but this is what we see in 2020. Even more startling is the amount by which the number of listings under contract exceeds the 2019 level – 34%. The market was strong this time last year, but now it is on fire.

There have been a number of articles written predicting that home prices will fall next year because of the damage to the economy by the COVID-19 pandemic. This will cause some people, those who took those article seriously, to be very surprised by the huge increase in pricing that is currently going on. The extremely high CMI reading indicates that the upward price trend will continue for the near and medium term, making any price reductions in 2021 rather unlikely.

Over the last 12 months, the average price per sq. ft. has increased over 17% and the current rate of increase in around 2% per month, meaning we are probably headed for an annual rate of over 20% fairly soon.

The economy has severely damaged the finances of a large number of people. However most of those people were unlikely to be in a position to buy a home anyway. Those who are in a position to buy a home have had their determination to do so increased dramatically by the pandemic. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening.

Foreclosure notices in Maricopa County numbered 99 during September. This is down 76% from September 2019. Some people are predicting that foreclosures will rise in 2021. The Cromford Report staff thinks that the record low levels of foreclosure activity in 2020 cannot last forever, but data released about delinquencies by the lending industry suggests that there is unlikely to be the sort of foreclosure flood that we saw in 2007 through 2012. Remember that the record monthly count was 10,712. That was truly a mountain of foreclosure notices and we currently have no more than a molehill.

Call us at 602-456-9388 if you need help building your strategy.

Here’s last month’s report, for comparison.