Mar. 22, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Closings drop for new, existing homes, but median prices climb

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Home Builders Research on Wednesday reported 1,411 new home sales in February, less than half the number sold in the same month a year ago. Nevertheless, the median price of a new home climbed 2.3 percent to $315,965.

It was the same story for existing homes. There were 2,332 recorded resales during the month, down 27.2 percent from a year ago. The median price rose 2.4 percent to $289,000.

“The Las Vegas housing market is still slugging it out for cautious consumers who are looking for steals and deals,” housing analyst Dennis Smith of Home Builders Research said.

The average price of a recorded resale was $369,005 in February, an increase of $34,193, or 10.5 percent, from last year. Smith said resales of high-rise and mid-rise condos are pushing up median and average prices and that must be taken into consideration.

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Mar. 18, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Housing-market watchers say the trend favoring big-house building may reverse

By JENNIFER ROBISON
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Some observers suggest smaller houses are gaining popularity with local buyers. But Pardee Homes said 3,600-square-foot homes in its Northpointe subdivision in North Las Vegas, above, are selling fast. Photo by Samantha Clemens.

It’s an American mantra: Bigger is better.

And nowhere is that philosophy more on display than in the American home.

The standard home in the United States jumped from about 1,500 square feet in the mid-1970s to an average of roughly 2,450 square feet in 2006, even as the typical American family shrank from 3.11 people to 2.59 people, the National Association of Home Builders reported in February.

Now, the association’s researchers are forecasting an end to the upsizing.

After 30 years of steady gains, the average size of an American home will stabilize in the next decade, remaining at about 2,400 square feet, said Gopal Ahluwalia, the association’s vice president of research.

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Mar. 09, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Townhomes, condos biggest culprit with 42.8 percent drop from 2006

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

The interior of a KB Home model is shown Thursday at La Vita at Seven Hills, a luxury community with prices from $1.4 million to $2 million. Photos by Samantha Clemens. Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson. One of the models of the KB Home development La Vita at Seven Hills includes a wine cellar.

The inventory of single-family homes, condos and townhouses listed for sale in Las Vegas increased again in February after easing off in late 2006, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported Thursday.

There are 19,639 single-family homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service, up 4.6 percent from 18,774 in January and up 11 percent from 17,675 in February 2006. Condos and townhomes for sale increased to 5,524, up 8 percent from 5,116 in January and up 34 percent from 5,212 last February.

Single-family sales slumped to 1,407 in February, a 21.3 percent decrease from the same month a year ago, but 10 more homes than were sold in January.

The condo and townhouse segment was worse. The 277 sales in February were off 12.9 percent from the previous month and 42.8 percent from a year ago.

The median price of a single-family home in Las Vegas inched up to $310,000 in February after declining in recent months. It increased 2.6 percent from January and 0.3 percent from last year.

The median condo price of $204,000 is down slightly from January and up 3.8 percent from February 2006.

Devin Reiss, president of the Realtors association, said it’s typical to see minor variations in the numbers from month to month.

“We seem to be a couple months up, a couple months down. Last month looked good for condos and townhome prices and now this month they’re back down and we see single-family prices going up,” he said.

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All of the licensed Las Vegas Realtors with Desert Homes Realty have access to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) which is the best possible tool that you could have available to you via your agent. 99% of the homes for sale on the Las Vegas resale market are listed on the MLS. The MLS allows your agent to enter in search criteria fitting all of your housing needs and returns only homes that match your specified search parameters. This saves you the buyer a lot of time and trouble.

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Mar. 04, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Gain rates for local home prices lose steam as housing market cools

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Cick image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson. A 2,024 square-foot home in Summerlin recently listed at $389,900. A year ago this home would have sold for $50,000 more. Photo by Jeff Scheid.

Home appreciation in Las Vegas has slowed dramatically from the torrid pace of two years ago and turned negative in some areas of the valley last year, a local housing market analyst said.

Median existing home prices increased 3.6 percent valleywide to $285,000 in 2006, based on more than 90,000 existing home closings recorded by the Clark County assessor’s office in 2005 and 2006, Larry Murphy of Las Vegas-based SalesTraq reported.

Murphy’s breakdown of 52 ZIP codes in the Las Vegas Valley showed 35 areas with positive appreciation, seven unchanged and 10 on the negative side.

The largest declines were 4 percent in ZIP codes 89044 and 89085, while gains reached 18 percent in 89030 and 89103.

“These results fly in the face of the doomsday sayers who only a year ago were predicting that property values in Las Vegas would drop precipitously when the real estate bubble burst in Las Vegas,” Murphy said. “It also flies in the face of local analysts who have been declaring all year long that property values are dropping. The fact is that following the boom of 2004 when we saw appreciation rates of 40 percent, the only thing that has dropped has been the appreciation rate itself.”

Murphy has had to make adjustments over five years of reporting appreciation by ZIP code, “tweaking” his calculations to account for factors that can skew the numbers. For example, he separated luxury high-rise condominium sales in ZIP code 89109, which includes the resort corridor east of the Strip, from single-family home sales to come up with 5 percent appreciation for 2006.

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Mar. 01, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Analyst sees little chance of sector rebounding this year

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Las Vegas mirrored the downturn in the national housing market as sales of both new and existing homes fell sharply in January.

New home sales fell to 2,052 in January, compared with 2,815 sales in the same month a year ago, Dennis Smith of Home Builders Research reported. It’s the lowest January since 2003 when only 1,541 new homes were sold in Las Vegas.

Excluding mid-rise and high-rise units, the number falls to 1,610. Panorama Towers led the month with 242 closings, followed by Manhattan with 81 and Platinum and Turnberry Towers with 59 each.

The median price of all recorded Las Vegas new-home sales in January was $334,945, a 10.3 percent increase from a year ago.

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Statistics for homes for sale in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 2006 shows us that the inventory of homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service in Las Vegas declined to 19,729 in November, down 16 percent from the previous month, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported Wednesday.

Las Vegas homes for sale are still up nearly 34 percent from a year ago, but the number appears to have peaked at 23,474 in October, a good sign for the local housing market, we are still in a Buyer’s Market at this time, and sellers have had to get more in line with their pricing compared to the times when we had no available inventory. It doesn’t really indicate that our housing prices and values have dropped, simply gotten realistic.

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Feb. 22, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Observer recounts bumpy housing year

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

A worker frames a house Wednesday at Palisades Estates in Las Vegas. Recorded sales of new homes in Las Vegas totaled 36,156 last year, down 7.2 percent from 38,957 in 2005, an analyst said. Photos by Gary Thompson. A worker finishes a house at Palisades Estates on Wednesday. At Las Vegas Housing Outlook 2007, housing analyst Dennis Smith said he expects the valley to tally 37,000 new home sales this year.

When someone asks housing analyst Dennis Smith how the Las Vegas market is performing, he has to ask what segment they’re talking about.

Sales declined for both new and existing homes and for apartment conversions in 2006, while high-rise and mid-rise sales increased, the president of Home Builders Research said Wednesday at Las Vegas Housing Outlook 2007.

“This market is too segmented to describe it in one sentence,” Smith told 1,200 people attending his annual presentation at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Recorded sales of new homes totaled 36,156 last year, down 7.2 percent from 38,957 in 2005. Without apartment conversion and high-rise sales, the number dropped to 29,493. Resales fell 28.4 percent, to 41,892 from 58,522.

The “traditional” single-family home is losing market share, Smith said. Detached home sales sank to 62 percent of the market in 2006, compared with 85 percent just a few years ago.

Age-restricted housing is going to be flat at 6 percent of the market and apartment conversions settled into a 12 percent share. Attached dwellings such as condos and townhomes account for 10 percent of sales and high-rise units are 9 percent of the market, headed for 10 percent, Smith said.

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