“While the majority of the nation’s housing markets are still working toward a bottom, some cities are boasting fundamentals that make them good places to buy a home now,” Forbes reported this week.

Denver is the best city to buy a home. Phoenix was ranked No. 2, followed by Boston, San Diego and Los Angeles.

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“The free market is at work,” said Shannon Hubbard, a real estate agent and blogger here. “Prices got driven down so much that people said, ‘I’m going to come out and play.’ ”

More homes are selling than at any time since 2006. Prices are slowly stabilizing. Buyers are once again finding themselves in frantic bidding wars — only this time over foreclosed houses selling at deep discounts rather than ranch homes listing for vast sums.

“Once this thing turns, it may turn slowly,” Gunterman said in an interview. “But at some point I think it’s going to pick up because prices are so low.”

Mike Orr, a Phoenix real estate analyst, thinks the market already has hit bottom. Among the signs: As recently as January, a year’s worth of homes sat on the market; in March, that dropped to seven months’ worth of inventory.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-phoenix18-2009may18,0,7979477.story

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Any renter with a stable job and the desire to become a homeowner and live in Phoenix for a long time should be buying a home right now because affordability has never been better (our analysis goes back to 1981). In 2006, owning a typical detached resale home was $600 per month more expensive (after taxes) than renting a Class A apartment.

-134 metro areas are at their historical best affordability level since 1981

Today, owning is $118 per month cheaper. Rents and home prices are both likely to fall in 2009, but the prospective homeowner who hopes to buy a home at the bottom is taking a huge risk that he or she will be able to qualify for a mortgage, not only because mortgage rates are currently at historic lows, but the high LTV (loan-to-value) programs that are currently backed by the government may no longer exist.

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