San Tan Valley Neighborhood Most Active In U.S. For iBuyer Home Purchases
A new survey of homes sales finds a neighborhood in San Tan Valley to have the most homes sold via iBuying. The data, which measures sales from January through October 2019, shows iBuyers purchased more than 10% of the homes in eight neighborhoods across the country last year. Three of those eight are in the Phoenix metro.
Phoenix; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; and Fort Worth, Texas; showed a strong presence of iBuyers in 2019, but Phoenix clearly dominated the trend. ZillowOffers launched in the Phoenix metro last year. Competitor online real estate agent OfferPad is based in Chandler.
"Right now, we're most known for the iBuying solution which is where consumers can come directly to our website, answer some questions about their house and then we will provide them an offer in 24 hours, an all cash offer," said Offerpad's Cortney Read.
The Phoenix metro now has at least 17 different companies offering cash to homeowners, all competing to stock up on highly resellable Phoenix’s homogenous housing.
"Up until probably five years ago, there hadn't been much investment at all in what's called prop-tech, or real-estate oriented fin-tech and that has really exploded in the last few years," said Gary Beasley, CEO of real-estate investment platform, Roofstock.
The study of sales through October shows the San Tan Valley neighborhood of Pecan Creek to be the most active neighborhood in the country for iBuyers purchasing 13.7% of homes. The Waddell neighborhood in Glendale, Laveen in Phoenix and Surprise Farms in Surprise also made the top 10 list.
"You've got the highest employment growth on a percentage basis of any of the large cities in the country. You've got low supply. You've got a lot of people moving there, a lot of demand," Beasley said.
The median 2019 iBuyer sales price in Pecan Creek was just under $230,000, approximately $16,000 less than the price through a traditional sales process.
