Scottsdale home sales, from the county’s own deeds

The source. Arizona law requires an Affidavit of Property Value with every deed recorded, giving the price, the month the sale was agreed, the type of property and how it was paid for, unless the transfer is exempt (a gift, a transfer into a trust, a foreclosure deed and others). The Maricopa County Assessor publishes the affidavits as the Sales Affidavits file, updated weekly. The file holds one row for each parcel: the latest affidavit recorded on it.

Inside the city limits. A Scottsdale address is not always a Scottsdale home. In the county’s file, 96 percent of the sales with a Scottsdale address in ZIP code 85254 are in Phoenix, and nearly a quarter of those in 85262 are on unincorporated county land. The record keeps only parcels the Assessor’s parcel map places in the City of Scottsdale (130,971 parcels in the latest file), and takes each one’s ZIP code, subdivision and living area from that map.

Houses and condominiums. “Houses” are what the affidavit calls a single-family residence; “condos” are its condo-or-townhouse box. Vacant land, apartment buildings, two-to-four-plexes, mobile homes, commercial property and farms are left out.

Valid sales only. Of the 9,922 house and condo affidavits in the window, the latest file’s run set aside 750 that do not measure a market price:

• 316: several parcels sold together
• 158: rejected by the Assessor
• 140: buyer and seller related
• 73: an exempt-type transfer
• 38: no price, or a nominal one
• 19: a partial interest
• 6: a warning that bears on the price

The Assessor marks each affidavit with a validation code. The record keeps sales with no flag and those with a warning that does not bear on the price (a buyer with an out-of-state address, for one), and drops the Assessor’s rejects, exempt-type transfers and the warnings that do bear on it (W3, W9, W10, W12, W16). It also drops any price under $10,000.

Medians, not averages. Each figure is the median: half the sales were higher and half lower, so a single estate sale cannot drag it. Prices are rounded to the nearest thousand dollars. A median is printed only where at least 10 sales stand behind it, and the middle-half range only where 20 do, so no figure on this page describes one household’s sale. Price per square foot divides the price by the living area on the Assessor’s record. Dollars are the dollars of the day, not adjusted for inflation.

The month is the contract month. The affidavit dates a sale by the month the buyer and seller agreed, and it is recorded at closing, usually weeks later. So the newest months fill in over time. A month enters the record once it ended at least 30 days before the county’s file; it is provisional until a file published 90 days after its end has counted it, and final after that.

Why the record starts in September 2024. Because the county’s file keeps only each home’s latest sale, a home sold in 2024 and again in 2026 shows only the 2026 sale. The older a month, the more of its sales have been overwritten this way. The record therefore reaches back only 24 months from its first file, and the earliest of those months undercount the homes that have sold since. From here it builds forward: each month’s figures are taken while the month is still recent and then frozen.

The communities. A community is counted by the subdivision names the county records, which works only where the plats carry the community’s name. That holds for DC Ranch, Grayhawk, McDowell Mountain Ranch, Desert Mountain and Troon and Troon North. McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale Ranch and Gainey Ranch were platted mostly under their neighborhoods’ own names, and Silverleaf’s homes are recorded as DC Ranch parcels, so a name match would undercount them; they are left out until a boundary file can define them. Silverleaf’s sales are inside the DC Ranch figure.

What it is not. This is not an appraisal of any home or a forecast of prices. It counts recorded sales, not listings, and it includes sales a listing service never sees, such as builders’ new homes and sales by owner, which is why its counts differ from a brokerage report’s. Portal indexes measure something else again: a modeled value of every home, sold or not. The county says its file is provided as is and does not guarantee its accuracy; this record inherits whatever errors it holds.