For decades to come, participants in the Valley’s housing economy are sure to remember 2009 as the Year of the Investor. Few of the roughly 79,000 Maricopa County home sales that closed in 2009 were more than a degree of separation away from investor activity, and even those exceptions were influenced in some way by investors’ presence in the market.
Thousands of individuals and institutions with dollars, deutschemarks, dinars or yen to spend began buying up homes in the Phoenix area after learning of an unprecedented spike in lender-initiated foreclosures that was clearing families out of starter-home subdivisions as quickly as deferred-payment plans and zero-down financing had ushered them in a few years earlier. more…