Arizona’s current housing market is one for buyers, according to professionals observing the real estate industry.
Redfin data shows the median sale price of a home is $443,611, while current interest rates are around 6.75%.
Sindy Ready, a real estate agent in Phoenix’s West Valley, said Arizona’s housing market is quiet, adding that the state’s housing market has been “pretty level” since 2025.
Ready told The Center Square it is a good time to be looking for a home because buyers don’t face some of the pressures they could see when home prices start increasing. Ready added that sellers are more in control of the housing market.
Buyers are not fighting with others over a house because there are fewer buyers currently, she explained.
Adam Baugh, a land-use attorney and a partner of the Phoenix law firm Withey Morris Baugh PLC, said very few homes in Arizona sell “that don’t go through a price reduction first.”
The current housing market is a buyer’s market in the sense that a buyer “can negotiate down the sales price,” he explained.
In the Phoenix metro area’s housing market, nearly one-third of home listings in April underwent a price reduction, according to realtor.com.
Ready said it is very common for buyers to get concessions from sellers when trying to buy a home. She added that buyers are “getting more concessions than they have been in a while.”
This follows national trends of buyers getting concessions, as nearly 50% of sellers nationwide gave concessions to buyers in May, according to Redfin.
Real estate agents working with sellers are having conversations with them about buyers asking to have their closing costs or buyer broker fees covered, Ready explained.
On a home currently selling for $425,000, a buyer is asking the seller to cover 2% to 3% in concessions, which ranges from $8,500 to $12,750, she noted.
The real estate agent said sellers are understanding that covering concession requests is part of getting a house to sell.
If a seller prices their house right and it is in good condition, people are buying those homes, Ready noted.
Today’s buyers are not interested in project homes, she explained, noting they like being able to move into a home that doesn’t need remodeling.
Baugh said it is taking time for sellers to “accept that today’s prices are not COVID-era anymore.” That’s when prices were higher and real estate was more of a seller’s market because of the increased demand for housing.
Arizona experienced a surge in population growth during the COVID pandemic, Baugh noted.
The influx of people created a “scarcity” in the state’s housing supply, which caused prices to go up, he explained.
The average home value in Arizona in March 2020 was $290,171, according to Zillow. Fast forward to July 2022, the average price of a home peaked at $465,765.
In June 2026, the average price was $424,168, which still represented a 46% increase from March 2020.
Baugh said the low mortgage rates seen during the 2007-2009 Great Recession and the COVID-19 era were exceptions to the usual rates that typically were close to 7%.
“That was an anomaly, not the norm, and I think people got comfortable with that and with an expectation that that’s how it would be forever,” he said.
Historically, Ready said, a 6.75% mortgage rate “is not that high.”
From September 2009 to May 2022, America never saw a mortgage rate higher than 5.1%, with the lowest being 2.67% in December 2020. That’s according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Some buyers who are used to their parents having 3% mortgage rates are waiting to see if rates will go down, but experts are predicting rates will not “drop drastically,” she said.
According to Baugh, the “biggest constraint on housing in Arizona is the time it takes” to go through the entitlement process, which are the steps a developer must go through to get government approval for a housing project.
n Arizona, it can take a developer between one and two years to get all the municipal paperwork approved, Baugh explained.
Every month a housing project is delayed, the carrying and financial costs increase, which gets factored into home prices, he added.
Arizona’s housing shortage has more to do with how long it takes to go through the entitlement process rather than how fast a home is built, Baugh said.
A report from the Common Sense Institute Arizona showed the state will always be in a housing shortage due to a lack of permits being issued.
Baugh noted if Arizona wants to continue to get new residents and employers, it needs to embrace different types of housing, such as condos, townhomes, duplexes, build-to-rent communities and accessory dwelling units.
Without these new housing options, Arizona will have a hard time attracting talent to work in the state’s new emerging economic fields, he said.
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