The West Valley housing market overall has been, and remains, low inventory/increasing prices. Although the West Valley has several thousand entitled units, commodities costs and supply chain issues have hampered the thousands of housing units to be built, both rental and ownership.
The impact of rising costs to housing providers and thus rising rents to renters is felt by many, including our military members. In this report I included comments from Luke AFB spouses describing the difficulties they find when they try to relocate to the West Valley from elsewhere.
Luke AFB personnel include Air Force, Navy and Marines, most of whom are of the lower ranks. Their housing allowance (BAH) in 2021 (for some ranks) is lower than it was in 2019. In all cases it is still quite low and many of the lower rank personnel have no choice but to share a house with several other airmen. This of course puts supply pressures on airmen with families seeking larger houses.
In an effort to inform and educate the Pentagon personnel who make BAH decisions for the upcoming year, WeSERV provided the Luke AFB Housing office a rental market information letter with detailed rental rates for each of the West Valley cities and Phoenix zip codes their personnel is most likely to live in given proximity to the base.
We provided not only market and MLS data for year over year and recent activity (as of Sept. 2021), but also discussed commodities, supply chain and various rental product within our market place.
While this information was collected to aid in the Luke AFB BAH discussion, it may be useful to other companies and renters coming into our market from elsewhere. WeSERV has already provided this information to Rep. Lesko, MAG, and soon to Senator Sinema, WESTMARC and area Chambers of Commerce.
I anticipate we will be updating this information in December 2021. If you or your Luke AFB client would like to add comments to the next update, please send me your information.
Special thanks to WeSERV member and Luke AFB spouse Danica Byczkowski for all her help providing me with information and connections to the Luke AFB spouse community.