Arizona like the rest of the country has suffered through the real estate bust.  Many prognosticators predicted that people who lost homes through foreclosures and short sales would be out of the real estate market for many years due to the bad credit that arises from defaulting on a home loan.  The good news is that the prognosticators may have been wrong.  A story in the Arizona Republic says:

“Thousands of new Phoenix-area homeowners are proving the experts wrong. These ‘boomerang buyers’ — so called by real-estate insiders because they were out of the market and have now come back — have returned as a major market force much earlier than expected. Many buyers are qualifying for a new loan only a few years after defaulting on their last mortgage.”