🏠 The Great Divide: Scottsdale Surpasses Phoenix for the First Time
It’s getting harder to ignore — the gap between the top and everyone else keeps stretching. The people at the upper end of the market aren’t just doing better; they’re playing an entirely different game.
Real estate makes that divide easy to see. And right now, Scottsdale just passed Phoenix in total housing dollar volume for the first time ever. That’s not a small shift — it’s a signal of how wealth is clustering more tightly than ever.
📊 Scottsdale Takes the Lead
Based on all closed listings in 2025 to date, Scottsdale is now larger than Phoenix in ARMLS dollar volume. This has never happened before.
Even though fewer than half as many homes have sold in Scottsdale, they are more than twice as expensive on average. The total dollar volume is $6,324,167,934 for Scottsdale, compared to $5,873,605,304 for Phoenix.
That means Scottsdale’s home market is now 8% bigger than Phoenix, as measured by ARMLS closings.
To put that in perspective:
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In 2024, Phoenix had a 1% advantage.
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In 2023, the margin in favor of Phoenix was 4%.
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In 2022, Phoenix led by 19%.
Before that, Scottsdale wasn’t even close enough to measure.
💰 Paradise Valley Joins the Surge
Paradise Valley has shared in that boom. So far in 2025, it has delivered $1,382,350,946 in closed listings — placing it in 5th place above Chandler.
Only Mesa, Gilbert, Scottsdale, and Phoenix generated more volume.
That’s despite PV having just 332 closings, roughly the same as Coolidge or Arizona City.
This is a new development. In 2024, PV ranked 8th and had less dollar volume than Chandler, Surprise, and Peoria.
Now it’s up a staggering 30% year-over-year.
🧭 What It All Means
It’s not just about expensive homes. It’s about a market pulling away from itself. Luxury buyers operate in a different lane — focusing almost exclusively on Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, with maybe a glance at Fountain Hills, Carefree, Cave Creek, and Phoenix’s Arcadia and Biltmore districts.
There may be luxury properties elsewhere, but out-of-state buyers rarely find them because they aren’t looking beyond the Northeast Valley. That focus alone has now made Phoenix no longer the largest housing market in Arizona, at least by dollar volume.
📈 The Bigger Picture
This all mirrors what’s happening in the stock market.
Companies tied to AI are skyrocketing in valuation — far beyond any normal measure of profitability. Nvidia’s market cap now exceeds the GDP of Japan.
It’s the same pattern in a different language: concentration at the top, growth detached from fundamentals, and widening distance between winners and everyone else.
⚠️ The Takeaway
We’ve been talking about this for a while — the separation isn’t slowing down, and it’s almost irrelevant where the broader market goes next. Whether prices rise, flatten, or fall, the top end keeps breaking away.
And while we can’t predict exactly when or how the correction comes, history reminds us: reversion to the mean is real.
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