Scottsdale Arizona Real Estate Blog

Corp.’s real-estate subsidiary has sold one of its holdings to the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which agreed to pay $3.4 million to buy SunCor’s stake in a resort community near St. George, Utah.

Pinnacle West announced in April 2009 it would try to sell many of its real-estate holdings to focus on its core business: providing electricity through subsidiary Arizona Public Service Co.

SunCor Development Co. officials at the time said they would keep about $70 million in commercial real-estate holdings and sell about $400 million in housing assets, but spokesman Alan Bunnell said Tuesday it’s all for sale now, including all the remaining SunCor property at Hayden Ferry Lakeside in Tempe.

“We have got everything on the market, pretty much,” he said. “We’ve got discussions with a number of parties on these. The goal is for us to continue refocusing on our core business, which is energy.”

Another goal was to reduce the company’s debt.

As of March 31, SunCor still had $96 million in debt, compared with $175 million when the sale was announced in early 2009, Bunnell said.

Pinnacle West also announced recently it would sell its district-cooling business that serves commercial buildings in parts of Phoenix and Tucson.

The Utah resort project SunCor is selling includes finished lots, office buildings and land. About half of 2,000 planned homes had been built at Coral Canyon off Interstate 15 in Washington County.

The development features a golf course that was sold to another buyer.

SunCor officials hoped to sell properties in Arizona, Utah, Idaho and New Mexico in 2009, but the delay doesn’t mean the company isn’t getting fair prices, Bunnell said.

“We would not have sold that (Utah) property if we didn’t believe we were getting the best value we could for it at this point in time,” he said.

Pinnacle West earnings have been hurt by SunCor. It has taken $334 million in annual pre-tax write-downs because of SunCor operations, $53 million in 2008, $266 million in 2009 and $15 million so far this year, Bunnell said.

Electricity customers in APS territory are not responsible for SunCor’s debt, Bunnell said.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

by J. Craig Anderson – May. 26, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

For a financially struggling homeowner, the decision to pursue a short sale does not come easily.

Homeowners who make that choice generally do so after months of searching and pleading for an alternative that would have kept them in the home.

Even when it goes smoothly, the short-sale process is painful for sellers. When it’s bumpy and slow, the pain is far worse, said experts who met in Tempe this month for an educational conference on short sales.

Far too many short sales have been plagued by false starts, confusion, delays and disappointments, they said.

Phoenix-area short-sellers’ many encounters with insult upon injury stem from a combination of problems, including sellers’ lack of experience with the process and lenders’ initial reluctance to adopt on a mass scale what they had long considered an obscure means of resolving bad mortgage debts.

Scottsdale resident Mary Purvis, 57, said Bank of America finally approved her short-sale application after 10 months of frustration and uncertainty.

But the pain didn’t stop there.

“The sale finally went through last September, but now BofA reported my short sale as a foreclosure on my credit reports, which I have no idea how to fix,” Purvis said.

Big mortgage lenders such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo are still smoothing out the wrinkles in their respective solutions to making short sales faster and more reliable. But they are now taking short sales very seriously and have made many improvements, one bank representative said.

Just as the average Valley homeowner never imagined losing a home to financial hardship, the average mortgage lender never dreamed the bank would have to set up an assembly line to churn out short-sale approvals.

Purvis did not attend last week’s conference to confront her lender directly, but Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America’s Matt Vernon, the bank’s top executive in charge of foreclosures and short sales, was there to face a roomful of like-minded consumers.

Vernon was quick to admit the bank’s flawed handling of short sales, but he said Bank of America has since taken a 180-degree turn.

It has implemented an automated system – the first of its kind – for tracking the progress of short sales and has reduced the average number of days it takes for a short-sale to be approved, from 90 days to just over 50 days.

The bank approved 18,000 short-sale applications in April, Vernon said.

Unfortunately, it received more than 50,000 short-sale applications that month.

“Our system was never designed to handle this kind of volume,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president and chief economist at RealtyTrac, based in Irvine, Calif., which collects and analyzes nationwide data on short-sales and foreclosures. “Short sales were never intended to be a mass-market product.”

That’s exactly what they have become, said Sharga, who spoke Friday at a Tempe conference organized by the Distressed Property Institute, a San Diego-based business that has developed a certification and training program for real-estate agents and other buyer and seller representatives in short-sale transactions.

Company founder and CEO Alex Chafen said the institute’s twofold purpose is to teach real-estate professionals how to be more effective at negotiating short sales, while giving homeowners who need representation a way to separate the short-sale experts from the novices.

The company created a special designation, Certified Distressed Property Expert, which it hopes will become synonymous with short-sale expertise.