New York Times Article
August 13th, 2008A few days ago I read a NY Times article regarding Kingman. I didn’t see the original article until I read comments on the article on a blog. The comments were not complimentary. Some of the less negative comments:
“The times is leading people to think that Kingman is a safe place to buy a house? I posted some info in the forum about Mohave County; they have about 20 properties a day going to foreclosure auction. When I drove through in June, the whole place looked like it was on sale. Read the article; 80k new houses?”
“Kingman is in the north west corner of AZ. Lots of CA and NV speculators ran up prices and the developers went nuts. There are so many bulldozed subdivision sites the country looks like an Inca desert drawing.”
I then read the article and researched the writer. The writer is not a NY Times reporter but a free lance writer from Las Vegas. I assumed the article was written as a pr piece to draw attention to the dwindling investment market in Mohave. Being from LV, the writer probably has ties to someone with investments in the area. The majority of the land purchases during the boom were by Las Vegans.
This is a feed of the original article (the NYT article requires registration, so this is from a NC paper).
Today the Miner has jumped on this with their own article. Now, based on a PR piece written by an LV writer (not a NY times reporter as the Miner calls him), we are going to gear up to the “inevitable” invasion. From the article:
Salem anticipated that once growth does get underway, especially following he completion of the four-lane Hoover Dam bridge in 2010, he expected it to be greater than the 5 to 6 percent rate it has been, but not so great as the boom experienced earlier this decade.”
http://www.kingmandailyminer.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1&articleID=16958
I see dollar signs and lots of debt in the future for our little town. The powers that be are counting on an illusion being trumpeted by speculators and developers who gambled and are losing their shirts, based on the current foreclosures.
No one has ever answered my questions regarding this “invasion” of Las Vegans.
..Why will the “bridge” cause hundreds of thousands of people to move here?
..Why will the “bridge” create more traffic through Kingman? Where is this additional traffic going to come from and why?
..Why would Las Vegans travel over 200 miles a day to live in Kingman when there are much closer alternatives in their own state if they choose to not live in Vegas proper?
..Prices have fallen so much in Vegas that larger houses are available for less money than in Kingman, why would they spend more to “commute” to a different state?
..When Las Vegans joke about the master planned community north of them and how they wouldn’t drive the 50 miles to live there, why would they drive 100 miles to live here? That community with a planned 150K homes cannot even get one home built. There is no demand.
good article thanks for posting
What is the assessor using to back up
higher land assessment values?
They use a computer program. The reason the taxes are increasing as prices go down is because, according to the assessor, the values are based on sales of two years ago. The values of comparable properties, even ones next door to each other, are so out of whack that I don’t think their “program” works very well.
Nice article. Yeah I had a realtor in Kingman tell me last week that it was like the San Fernando Valley in the 1930s. You have to be kidding. It’s Kingman not Hollywood.
Sadly, Kingman houses are higher priced per square foot than any of the areas we are tracking. Which includes Las Vegas, Pahrump, West Phoenix suburbs and Apple Valley in California.
The prices are down in the lower end houses, but per square foot they are still high compared to pre-2005 prices. The larger houses in the south east area are still as much as 2 times higher per foot than pre-2005.
Comparable houses in the other towns we are following are running 30-80 a square foot for the type homes that are still going for 140+ a foot in Kingman, even foreclosures
Realtors here still think they should be higher than other areas because it is more desirable here. When I mentioned that Kingman was higher priced than many areas of Kingman, I was told prices should be higher than Calif. because who wants to live there with all the new taxes.
Apparently speculators are here once again snapping up the bargains. We tried to look at a house we were interested in but the realtor was too busy and didn’t call or email us like she said she would. I emailed to find out why and didn’t even get a return email. You would think she could take the time to at least say she didn’t have time to show us the house.
Looks like it’s back to 2005 again with the realtors only interested in dealing with investors who buy site unseen.
Being very familiar with the San Fernando Valley, prices have dropped hundreds of thousands and still have room to go.
California is infamous for boom/bust periods and always return to the fundamental values in a bust. You have to go by per square foot because in general the lots and houses are larger than the median in Kingman. Also they have jobs and the shopping and freeway interchanges that the realtors feel is the answer to everything.
California also has prop13 which protects the homeowners taxes from the bubble prices. Kingman homeowners on the other hand have seen huge tax increases based on unsustainable bubble prices.
I saw a bullhead home that was purchased in 2003 for 167,000 have the “value” increased to 900,000 by the assessor. Needless to say, they hadn’t paid their taxes.