City of Sedona building permits issued for single family homes is bell weather indicator for the overall health of the real estate market in the Verde Valley, especially for the lot/land segment of the market. As inventory of single family homes continues to shrink we can expect to see an increase in buyers turning to building their own home to get a home that will meet their needs and expectations. As of this writing there are 319 single family homes on the market and of those 64 are under contract. Of the 255 homes not under contract, 60 are priced over $1,000,000, leaving 195 below $1,000,000 and 119 below $500,000.

In the meantime land sales are starting to pick up. For the first 8 months of 2011 there were 60 closed land sales in the Sedona area, for the same time period in 2012 there are 83 sales. That is a 38% increase in the number of sales year to date 2012.

The City of Sedona has building permit statistics back through 2005 on the City of Sedona Website. For single family homes, building permits issued peaked in 2005 and were strong through 2007 as expected and then took a dive in 2008 to 21 permits issued and a further decrease in 2010 to 13 permits issued. From all appearances we are looking at an increase in 2012 of about 25%

 

 

The City of Sedona website also includes the toal valuation of all permits issued. Surprisingly there was not the overall drop off in total valuation that might have been expected in 2008 and 2009, instead there was an increase. Fortunatley for the city total valuation was bolstered by commercial building activity during that time with $10,000,000 in commercial permits issued in 2009.

 

 

With the continued decline in Single family inventory I think we can expect to see the number of building permits issued for single family homes increase for the rest of 2012 and 2013. This will be good news for sellers of land in the Sedona area. Click here to see all the Sedona Land For Sale that is currently on the market.