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 Lure of fringe: open space, lower cost Why do the Valley's fringes, such as Pinal County, keep getting pushed farther out? Besides the steady flow of new people moving to the Phoenix area who want to buy new homes, real estate analysts list these top reasons: • Lower land costs mean larger homes with smaller price tags. • Lack of available land for large or affordable developments closer in. • Plenty of open space for amenities, such as soccer fields, golf courses and new schools. • Less stringent zoning that allows development to go up more quickly. • Some still move to the Valley to live next to the desert. There are disadvantages. • Some sameness in the types of homes and long commute times.
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A record number of buyers from Greater Phoenix flocked to Pinal County to
buy bigger homes for fewer bucks.
The emerging hot spot for home building has stretched the boundaries of the
Valley past Queen Creek out as far southeast as Casa Grande and Florence.
New home construction in Pinal County last year accounted for nearly 10
percent of the record 38,914 single-family housing permits for the Greater
Phoenix area, according to R.L. Brown's Phoenix Housing Market Letter.
A few years ago, the area had less than half that market share.
"It doesn't matter how much farther they have to drive, buyers obviously
want the value they're getting in Pinal County," Brown said.
Homeowners who bought these homes were willing to commute up to an hour or
more to downtown Phoenix.
For the first year, The Arizona Republic's annual housing market
survey will track sales and prices in Pinal County. Historical data aren't
available because of the newness of the area's boom, but figures from the
second half of last year show almost 1,700 new and used home sales in Pinal
cities bordering Maricopa County, according to Marketron/Infocom.
The area first got serious attention from buyers in the late-1990s, when
Phoenix builders such as KB Home and Richmond American began opening
subdivisions in Casa Grande, right off Interstate 10. People, working mostly
in the Valley, snapped up the houses priced as low as $80,000.
Then Johnson Ranch, about 10 miles southeast of Queen Creek on Hunt Highway,
opened with houses priced in the same range, but those homes were built
around a golf course. More than 2,000 homes sold within just a few years,
and other planned communities such as the Village at Copper Basin have
recently opened up around it.
Last year, El Dorado Ranch in the town of Maricopa opened to buyers. Pinal
County could rival the West Valley for new home building during the next
decade, said Nate Nathan, a Valley land broker with Nathan & Associates.
"The area has the potential to see as many as 150,000 new residences in the
near future," he said.
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 2, 2003