Every agent says Phoenix is a great market. The 90-day data tells a more interesting story, and your strategy depends on which side of the split you're on.

Every agent in Phoenix right now is telling you it's a great market. We pulled 90 days of data, and the truth is a lot more interesting than that. Because right now, Phoenix is not one market. It's two. And if you don't know which one you're in, your strategy is probably wrong.

The split you need to understand. If you're buying or selling a single-family home above $500,000, especially in central Phoenix or Scottsdale, sellers still have the upper hand. Demand is strong, inventory is tighter, and well-priced homes are moving. But if you're in a condo, a townhome, or you're looking under $400,000 to $500,000 on the outer fringes of the metro, the dynamic is completely different. Buyers are in control in those segments. There's more inventory, less urgency, and more room to negotiate.

That's not a small distinction. It changes everything about how you price a home, how you write an offer, what concessions you ask for, and how aggressive you need to be. The worst thing you can do right now is treat the Phoenix metro like it's one market and build your strategy around a generic headline.

What the numbers actually show. Year over year, sales ticked up 5.4%. That's about 7,700 homes sold in April. Under-contract numbers are up about 7.5% year over year, which tells us demand is real. People are buying. Activity is happening. This is not a frozen market by any stretch.

But here's the catch. Once you factor in inflation, the median price of $450,000 is actually lower in real dollars than it was a year ago. Prices look stable on paper, but your purchasing power tells a different story. What that means in practice is that buyers who are in the market right now are getting more home for their money than they would have a year ago, even though the sticker price looks roughly the same. That's an important distinction that gets lost when people only look at the median price and call it flat.

“Phoenix is not one market right now. It’s two. And if you don’t know which one you’re in, your strategy is probably wrong.”

What's happening with inventory. Active listings appear to have hit their peak and are starting to ease. In a normal year, that would be straightforward good news for sellers; less supply means less competition. But this peak came late in the season. Typically, listing activity ramps up earlier, and demand softens toward the end of May and into summer. So what we're heading into is a period where supply and demand could flatten out at the same time.

That's not a crisis, it's not a correction, it's a plateau. And a plateau is actually a useful thing to understand because it means the next 60 days are unlikely to bring dramatic price swings in either direction. Prices aren't about to spike, and they aren't about to drop. What that creates is a window of stability, and it's in that window that smart negotiation happens.

Your window to negotiate is right now. This is the part most people miss. In a market that's splitting by segment and flattening on price movement, the advantage goes to the people who understand exactly where they sit and use that information to negotiate from a position of knowledge. If you're a buyer in the under-$500,000 range, you have more room to negotiate right now than you've had in a long time.

If you're a seller in the higher-end single-family market, you still have the upper hand, but pricing it right from the start matters more than ever because the buyers in that segment are informed and they're doing their homework.

The point is, a one-size-fits-all answer doesn't work in Phoenix right now. What works depends on your specific neighborhood, your price point, and the type of property you're looking at. And the gap between those segments is wide enough right now that the wrong assumption could cost you real money.

If you're thinking about buying or selling in the Phoenix metro area, we'd love to sit down with you and break down exactly what these numbers mean for your specific situation. Give us a call at 480-267-9368, email us at Office@GoodCompanyRE.com, or visit www.goodcompanyre.com. We'll show you the numbers that actually matter for your move.