Phoenix Foreclosures Rise Again

A moratorium on foreclosures by some of the nation's largest banks didn't really help the distressed market in Phoenix. Arizona's largest city has seen an increase in the percentage of foreclosures when some other major cities were reporting a slight drop off at the start of the year.

Foreclosures represented 43 percent of the transactions in the single-family-home resale market by January's end, up from 30 percent in the last few months of 2010. More than 3,600 single-family homes were foreclosed in January. That's way up from less than 2,500 in December.

"The main question for the coming months is whether the January surge in foreclosure activity is a temporary response in unclogging the pipeline after foreclosure moratoriums ended or a continuation of a market being dominated by foreclosures," says Jay Butler, an associate professor of real estate at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University who writes a monthly report on the areas real estate market.