GOODYEAR, Ariz. — As more and more people come to live in the Valley, new hotspots to buy homes in Arizona are popping up.
Kim Panozzo with the HomeSmart Elite Group is almost a 20-year veteran of Valley real estate. She weighed in on where you can buy now to get a potential great return on your investment within the next decade.
“Really, that Coolidge-Florence area, Maricopa, Casa Grande is on fire and what I feel the reasoning for that is, number one, affordability, but also, the job growth,” said Panozzo. “Another great area and opportunity where I see some major growth is that Goodyear and Buckeye area.”
ABC15 caught up with the Wittas family in the Buckeye area. They moved into a new development off Sun Valley Parkway several years ago when Michael Wittas got a job at a new power plant.
“It was the closest little island of suburbia out by the power plant,” he said. “That was one of the reasons we moved out here; it seemed like an up-and-coming community.”
Wittas was right about the last part, and the company he works for wasn’t the only one with the idea to set roots in the West Valley.
Companies like toy manufacturer Funko Inc. and battery cell maker KORE Power announced this year they’d chosen to build facilities in the Buckeye/Goodyear region.
Panozzo predicts it will bring a boom in the housing business from employees looking for homes, and in turn, a great area for investment.
“I know this being in real estate as long as I have – you get in that ground floor opportunity in a community, the long-term growth for you is going to be fantastic,” she said.
Douglas Ranch is a planned community about to add to the explosion in the West Valley’s home growth. It will add about 37,000 acres of development just north of the Wittas’ community – almost three times the size of Manhattan.
“We think that Douglas Ranch - if we do it right and if we do it consistently with the way we’ve developed the other master plans in the Howard Hughes community - will have as many folks working in Douglas Ranch as living there,” said Howard Hughes Corp. CEO David O’Reilly.
Douglas Ranch will include about 100,000 houses and about 55-million square feet of commercial space. It’s set to break ground next year with the construction of Trillium, a 3,000-acre village within the complex.
“It’s going to be nice,” said Wittas. “Just seeing everything that used to be that open desert grow.”
