With home sales and construction plans sliding and prices flat, there’s little reason to feel “warm and fuzzy” about Las Vegas’ housing market next year, a new report says.
Builders sold 548 new homes in Southern Nevada last month, bringing the year’s tally to 5,396, down 20 percent from the same period in 2013, according to Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research.
The median price of last month’s closings was $295,000, down less than 1 percent from a year ago.
The permit total “was again a disappointment,” the report said, as builders pulled 379 new-home permits in November. That put the year’s tally at 6,126, down 7 percent year-over-year.
Local and national economists have given upbeat projections about the economy for next year, but with housing activity down, “it is hard to feel warm and fuzzy about the 2015 housing market in Las Vegas,” Home Builders Research President Dennis Smith said in the report.
Sales have plunged this year as would-be buyers, saddled with credit woes, flat wages and sticker shock, can’t pay developers’ high listing prices.
Moreover, despite “what some press releases suggest,” the resale market has also been slumping, Smith wrote.
Real estate agents are describing Las Vegas as a buyer’s market, and listings of previously owned homes no longer get multiple offers or bidding wars, according to Smith. Sales incentives are common, as buyers’ agents get follow-up calls from sellers’ agents asking what the sellers can do to help get acceptable offers.
The resale business is slowing as investors, faced with fewer bargains, pull back from Las Vegas.
After the economy tanked, investors bought cheap homes in bulk to turn into rentals, helping revive the battered housing market and pushing up prices at one of the fastest rates nationally.
Now, faced with those rising prices, they are buying fewer homes. As a result, more listings are being ignored, sales volume is dropping and prices aren’t rising nearly as fast.
Despite the overall slowdown, Las Vegas’ housing market is still better than it was at the depths of the recession, when prices plunged, construction dried up, foreclosures swept through the valley and the vast majority of homeowners with mortgages were underwater.
“Although the 2014 annual housing numbers were not as good as most had hoped,” Smith said in this week’s report, “it could have been worse.”