This month’s market update should be called the “shortage update” and it continues to tell the story of a housing market that is in severe shortage. We showed a home two weeks ago that had 70 offers on it. I was flabbergasted.

Not every listing is like that. That was certainly an outlier. But, we are seeing multiple offers coming in 20% over listing price, with the appraisal contingency waived and even sometimes the inspection contingency waived. Waiving the inspection contingency is very dangerous territory, unless you are sitting on a couple bitcoins that you are willing to sell in case some major repairs come up.

Let’s have a look at the Cromford Report‘s monthly infographic in their shortage update. There are only 4,761 active listing on the market. That is 57% less than there were this time last year. And that year was dramatically down from 2019!

In short, even if we doubled the number of listings on the market, prices would still be climbing. The demand is that strong.

It is also notable for this shortage update that the month’s supply is as low as it’s been in 20 the last 20 years. When we talk about month’s supply, we think in terms of how long the current inventory would last if no more homes came on the market. In other words, we would exhaust all of the homes for sale in 15 days if no more properties were coming on the market.

The listing success rate is very high, but it’s been that way for a while. Still, the fact that 92% of all listings will close, rather than expire or cancel, is amazing.

So, what does this mean for you? If you have been wanting to buy a home, we suggest you either prepare to go in much higher than asking price with extra cash to waive the appraisal contingency, or sit back and save your money. This has to change sometime.

If you are sitting on investment properties, please consider selling. One of the reasons for this shortage is that tens of thousands of people bought homes to turn in to rentals. So, if we are going to stabilize this market, we need those properties to come on the 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, Donna talks about Virginia Park, which was an out-growth of the domestic World War II experience.

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World War II had been raging for nearly nine months, but the women of the newly formed Virginia Garden Club had other interests to occupy their time. In an effort to “safeguard” the children of their surrounding community, they proposed to sponsor a park near where they met. It needed to be north of Virginia Avenue.

Both Coronado Park and Country Club Park were each nearly a mile away, one to the south and the other to the west, and meant crossing several busy streets to reach. This was simply unacceptable to the women for the children of their growing area.

But first they needed some land. Conveniently, there was vacant parcel on the northeast corner of 15^th Street and Virginia Avenue which they purchased. Check that item off the list. Playground equipment was necessary; a generous donor gave the club the equipment. Another item checked off the list. Finally all that was left was the landscaping which might have been the easiest part for the club. After all, gardening was what brought those sixteen women of Virginia Garden Club together in the first place.

The Virginia Garden Club held a Halloween Carnival in Virginia Park in October 1943. With the proceeds, they purchased new playground equipment the following Spring. Now the park would have new teeter-totters, baby swings, parallel bars, and a place to shoot basketballs.

Around the same time, the City of Phoenix stepped in and purchased the land from the garden club and added this .5 acre parcel of land into the city parks system. Now within a little over one mile square, three different parks served the residents.

Despite the city’s purchase, the ladies of the Virginia Garden Club continued to tend to the needs of the park for a number of years. According to the Valley Garden Center, “it was one of the most outstanding projects of any [valley] garden club.”

Of the three parks within the boundaries of Thomas Road to the north and McDowell Road to the south and 7^th Street to the west and 16^th Street to the east, each has a quite a different history. Country Club Park was planned with the subdivision. The land for Coronado Park, like Virginia Park, was purchased by the city and is the oldest of the three. Today, Virginia Park has modern equipment which meets current safety standards. The neighborhood applied for a grant to pay for the equipment following in the footsteps of the original group of women who had an idea while the rest of the world was at war.

What does the Voting Rights Act have to do with a real estate newsletter? Well, you know me, folks. I think voting rights are the core to everything we hold dear. Without full participation in our democracy, nothing works as it should or could –even the housing market. We know that from the shameful role that realtors played in red lining; a practice that only subsided when governments, pushed by voters, wrote laws to put an end to it.

I did a series of videos about the current attempts to update and reform the Voting Rights Act, in two bills: The John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act and the For the People Act.

The John Lewis Act updates the law that was undermined by a Supreme Court decision in 2013 called Shelby v. Holder. In that decision, the court decided that certain states could not be required to submit their laws to pre-clearance by the Justice Department, despite more than a century of voting rights abuses toward minority groups. The court said that the federal government could not treat some states differently from others. So, for instance, it could not require Georgia to submit to pre-clearance simply based on the fact that they were identified in the Voting Rights Act.

The John Lewis Act changed the law to comply with the Shelby decision by subjecting states to the pre-clearance if they have had either 15 or more voting rights violations within the last 25 years, or 10 voting rights violations and 1 violation of which that was committed by the state itself (as opposed to a jurisdiction within the state) within the last 25 years. Those violations are defined by whether they have been ruled against by a federal court in a standing decision.

Let me put that in laymen’s terms. If your state is out there restricting voting rights, then the Department of Justice gets to have a look at the laws you pass.

The For the People Act is a list of many important items that improve election security, guarantee greater access to the polls, addresses congressional ethics issues, reduces partisan influence on redistricting and even calls for statehood DC residents (you know, the people who embody the term “taxation without representation.”

I’m a fan of the analysis done by the Brennan Center for Justice, and I’ve worked with them on redistricting issues in the past. This is one of those groups I would like to support as well in our Charity Referral Network.