Arizona Real Estate, US Real Estate

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the subtleties and landscapes (no pun intended) of real estate in Arizona, and have come up with a handful of tidbits which I find really different and interesting. I wanted to share them, so here goes.

1. Like just about everything else in the country right now, property prices in Arizona have plummeted over the last year. Zillow.com offer some great city-by-city statistics on this, if you’re interested in checking them out. While the prices have been cut in half (and by more than that in some places), now that the economy is supposedly on an up-swing, this means people with money to spend on real estate in Arizona have a great position. You can buy cheap and wait to cash in as property values and prices rise.

2. Arizona has low, competitive property taxes which, although they vary from one city, town or village to the next, holding relatively low at an average of 1.3% on market value. States like New York have property taxes that are nearly 40% higher than the national average, so Arizona residents get a pretty sweet deal on their taxes!

3. In 2006, the DaimlerChrysler (remember back when Chrysler wasn’t part of Fiat?) Proving Grounds, located to the northwest of Phoenix, were sold for a record-breaking $312 million dollars to a group of developers who paid a premium price for this huge tract of land. (Okay, that one doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the points about owning property in Arizona, but it’s an interesting fact about how much money has exchanged hands for massive – we’re talking 5,500 acres here – tracts of land in this state in the past).

4. The owner of the Grand Ole Opry has been planning a huge hotel located in Mesa, Arizona, since September 2008. This hotel would be the biggest one in Arizona, featuring a huge golf course and other amenities for guests.

There are plenty of other interesting elements to Arizona’s real estate scene. If you look for yourself, you’ll be surprised at what you find!