Finally, a new homebuyer enters the Phoenix market.

Few states have been hit as hard by the mortgage crisis as Arizona. Years of rapid growth, even more rapid construction and unscrupulous lending practices have taken their toll. To make things worse, this has been combined with greedy people thinking they were just smarter than the rest of us so that they could keep on jumping up the housing ladder into more expensive homes until suddenly they were making enormous payments on mansions that were worth less than what they owed *. These erstwhile 'sharks' have become the 'marks.' It seems that every week I see big stickers plastered on the front of the Arizona Republic advertising an auction of hundreds of foreclosed properties. And with the credit crisis, hundreds of them also go unsold at any price.

But it's nice to know that there is apparently a new homebuyer in the Phoenix metro market. A buyer who is known to have bought property here before. A guy who certainly has the cash to pay for some of these homes. A guy who really isn't all that good with the numbers, in fact he doesn't even know how many he has now (so what the heck, one more can't hurt, right?)

Here are some property signs advertising the new homebuyer in town:




and



Hat tip to Tedski at Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.

*-- almost too polite to mention, but the areas where there are the highest levels of foreclosures on relatively new and expensive homes have in recent years voted heavily Republican. Granted people who have been hit with a huge ARM reset they couldn't pay and been foreclosed on come from all walks of life and it's a miserable experience for anyone, but probably most of the really expensive homes that are being foreclosed around metro Phoenix, their buyers were the jerk that cuts you off while driving a giant SUV with a fading "W" bumper sticker and thinks social Darwinism is real and that he's (95% chance it's a male) at the top of the gene pool.