PHOENIX — After four years of renting because they were priced out of the real estate market, Jamia Jenkins and Scott Renshaw concluded the time had arrived for them to buy.
They saw that home prices had dropped so fast here -- faster than in any other big city in the nation -- that mortgage payments would be less than the $900 they paid in rent. The city is littered with foreclosed houses, so the couple figured they could easily snatch up something in the low $100,000s.
Three months later, they're still looking.
They have submitted 13 offers and been overbid each time.
"It's just pathetic," said Jenkins, 53. "Investors are going out there and outbidding everyone."
Phoenix's housing bust has turned into a quasi-boom, a sign that its market may have hit bottom and a sneak preview of what a national housing recovery could look like.
More homes are selling than at any time since 2006. Prices are slowly stabilizing. Buyers are once again finding themselves in frantic bidding wars -- only this time over foreclosed houses selling at deep discounts rather than ranch homes listing for vast sums.
"The free market is at work," said Shannon Hubbard, a real estate agent and blogger here. "Prices got driven down so much that people said, 'I'm going to come out and play.' "
Home prices continue to plummet or tread water in much of the nation, but there have been tentative signs of life. Pending home sales rose 3.2% nationally in April, the second month of increases after a record low in January.
John Burns Real Estate Consulting in February identified Phoenix as "the most unique market in the nation," where affordability was better than at any time since 1981 and buying a house was once again cheaper than renting.
Since then, said Chris Porter, a manager at the Irvine-based firm, there have been signs of life in the Sacramento and Washington, D.C., housing markets.
"You'll start to see some markets emerge, and it'll be the ones that went into the downturn first," Porter said. "But it's going to be a slow recovery."
Phoenix experienced one of the most dramatic real estate crashes in the nation. Median home prices for resold homes peaked at $268,000 in June 2006. Now the median price is $120,000. It is the biggest decline in the top 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index.
