What's your story Frank?

Growing up, Frank Aazami often overheard his enterprising family discuss business opportunities, how to create jobs and advise their entrepreneur circle of friends on how to make business ventures thrive and ascend to the next level.

Today, as proud leader of Private Client Group at Russ Lyon I Sotheby’s International Realty in Scottsdale, he continues to offer the skills, experience and savvy marketing your luxury property deserves for a quick and profitable conclusion. Conversely, he will help you find the right home to fit your lifestyle and budget.

Master of marketing, Frank delivers a bold message — an aggressive getting-in-front-of-the-right-buyers approach, locally and globally. “We not only unite buyers and sellers through our lifestyle search approach but also through our creative marketing alternative approach,” says Frank, who came to the Valley seven years ago with his wife and daughter. “I was immediately amazed at the opportunity and the potential growth of this market.”

Finding solutions is his forte: “I solve my clients’ objectives. Whether they are upsizing or downsizing in square footage or in price; lately the requests have been from a residential assets into a commercial ones or reversed,” Frank says.

“Because of my international outreach, I have the ability to seamlessly shift my clients’ real estate from and to their desired markets around the globe,” he adds. “I also find creative ways to use my clients’ assets, such as free-and-clear art and collectibles toward a purchase; arrange owner financing; find trade options and other valuable asset exchanges.”

Frank’s expertise and enthusiasm have allowed him to survive and thrive through the recent downturn and will continue to assist him, his clients and colleagues into much better times he sees ahead.

What’s the market like? The Arizona market was never unhealthy, he says. The number of units sold since the downturn never really decreased. In fact, Arizona never missed a beat; properties just sold for less. This is a unique market because the Valley is a major destination.

This is not to say that boom times are just over the next hill: Overall home prices at the end of last year in Arizona were 2.4 percent below where they were at the same time a year earlier. And, the average home in the state is worth just half of what it was five years ago.

Still, we’ve shown other signs of a turnaround in addition to overall pricing increase, such as fewer foreclosures and the end of the underpriced-homes glut, with a more balanced market now for houses under $300,000.

Mike Orr, at the W. P. Carey School, explains that the average price per-square-foot for single-family homes increased 3 percent from January 2011 to January 2012. In addition, the market saw about 8,000 new- and existing-home sales in January 2012; that’s up from fewer than 7,500 last January. And, because peak buying normally starts in February, better results
should be expected through the year.

Another highly respected economic forecaster, Marshall Vest of the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, believes that these overall good numbers suggest the bottom may have been reached but wants to wait another quarter to see a maintained trend.

The supply-to-demand factor will fix the damage. The supply of homes listed for sale in Arizona went down 42 percent from January 2011 to January 2012.  As more demand
kicks in even greater, prices will follow suit; the investors who have been buying up for-sale and foreclosed homes during the last few years are anticipating a bounce back, not a gradual increase.

We at Russ Lyon I Sotheby’s have noted a confirmed market price bottom during the third quarter 2011, and comfortably now 8 percent above that low point when measured by average $/SF and 12 percent above when measured by monthly median sales price. Where will pricing go from here? One direction is that when supplies dry up — ask any architect/builder/developer — there’s new bidding and new breaking ground happening today.

We have to go back to December 2010 to find a figure higher than this, so we have concluded that the upward trend that started in the second half of September will stay in place at least for a while and, hopefully, more.

The unusually low supply for homes below $500,000 suggests that that upward trend is more likely to accelerate than slow down. There are no factors suggesting a price decline that we can currently see. Above $500,000, the demand remains relatively strong in areas such as 85255 and 85253, while custom home bidding has increased markedly over the last few months, especially within custom built projects. If you can’t find the right home, you have no choice but to build it.

At Russ Lyon I Sotheby’s International Realty we also watch the respected Cromford Market Index™, which provides a short-term forecast for market balance between buyers and sellers. The index has been rising for two years, moving toward better value and away from the unbalanced buyer’s market of the last four years.

As the index leads actual sales pricing by a year or so, this also suggests a trend toward higher average sales throughout the Valley, including the luxury markets of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and parts of Phoenix, Carefree and Fountain Hills.

At the same time, as it’s still a buyers’ market — there are many available homes trading
under their replacement cost — the current market offers fantastic opportunities to get a great home at a great price. It becomes a sweeter deal with interest rates at a record low, he says.

So, for the home-building industry, Frank is extremely optimistic: “Take out your hardhats
and let the building begin.” To reach Frank directly 480.266.0240 or email him at faazami@gmail.com. For homes on the market, see www.FrankAazami.com.

— written by David M. Brown