With the new year well underway, experts are doing their best to predict what the 2015 housing market has in store for the Phoenix metropolitan area. All across the board, predictions seem to be a mixed bag from the more optimistic projections to the downright cautious. Many claim that while the market could increase by as much as 30 percent it could just as easily stagnate and remain flat.

Positive Market Signs

There are several housing experts that consider the increase in jobs and population to be a positive sign when it comes to the housing market. Greg Vogel, the CEO of Land Advisors, the largest brokerage company in the US today, believes that the creation of new jobs in Phoenix along with the increasing number of people moving to the area could influence a positive trend in the new home building rate. Growth within households could also create a larger demand for newer, larger homes.

Furthermore, Vogel points out that most of the excess housing that saturated the market during the crash is now occupied by new owners or rented out to tenants. This factor could also contribute to an increasing demand for new housing in the Valley. Realtor.com seems to agree with these positive predictions, stating on their website that the Phoenix housing market has the potential to be an up and coming power as the US housing market still struggles to recover.

New Home Construction

Yet, at the same time Vogel and other experts remain unsure about their predictions. After the bust of 2011, most realtors predicted that by 2015, the Phoenix metro area would have bounce back to constructing anywhere from 20,000 to 25,000 new homes. Obviously, so far these predictions have not come to fruition. According to the Land Advisors’ annual 2014 forecast, permits to build new homes will be somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000, much below the numbers predicted directly after the real estate crash.

With these mixed signals in mind, many experts, including Vogel, are being cautious. While the new house building market could increase from anywhere from 15 to 30 percent, it could also remain flat for the entirety of 2015. Phoenix homeowners might simply choose to remodel or add additions to their existing homes instead of going through the process of building a new home, as they have in the past several years.

In the end, 2015 housing market predictions remain vague, or in Vogel’s words, a “wild card”. Only time will tell when it comes to new house building in Phoenix.

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