Phoenix-Area Vacant Land Buying Spree Triggered As Builders Unload Lots

In metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, The Arizona Republic reports:

• Home sales are down, but there's a mini land-buying spree going on in metropolitan Phoenix. Home builders are selling off land that they can't sell homes on in the near future. Investors are buying home lots for bargain prices, which lets them hold onto the properties until the demand for homes picks back up. In the last few weeks of 2007, as many as 8,000 vacant but finished home lots ready for construction sold in the Phoenix area, according to Scottsdale-based land brokerage and consulting firm Nathan & Associates.

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• [M]any builders who operated primarily as manufacturers and not long-term land developers in the past, need to get the dirt off their books. [...] RL Brown, publisher of the Phoenix Housing Market Letter, tallied 61,000 finished lots sitting empty across the Valley.New-home buyers may not want the lots now, but investors do. The trend is also playing out in other parts of the country where builders loaded up on land during the boom. "A lot of the investment bankers have determined metro Phoenix is one of the safest place to invest based on correction figures," Nathan said.

For more, see Slump fuels home-lot sell-off.