Investor interest in Las Vegas homes continues to drop

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Realtors Robin Camacho, right, and her son Jordan Camacho, center, look through one of the main rooms of a home for sale with John Bergeson of Los Angeles, Aug. 24, 2010 in Las Vegas.

In another sign that housing investors are clearing out of Las Vegas, such buyers picked up a larger share of homes nationally than in Southern Nevada in 2015, a reversal from recent years.

Just 2.2 percent of home sales in the Las Vegas area last year went to “institutional” investors, or nonlenders who buy at least 10 homes per year. That’s down from 7.6 percent in 2014 and 14.1 percent in 2013, according to RealtyTrac.

Such investors accounted for 2.7 percent of U.S. home sales last year, compared with 5.8 percent in 2014 and 7.6 percent in 2013.

Last year’s national tally was the lowest since 2000, the earliest year for which RealtyTrac has data, the company said.

Las Vegas had the 13th-highest share of investor purchases in the country in 2013 among metro areas. It fell to 33rd in 2014 and tied for 91st last year, RealtyTrac reported.

Investors flooded Las Vegas and other cities after the housing bubble burst to buy cheap homes, often in bulk, to turn into rentals. The buying spree helped revive Southern Nevada’s housing market, pushing up prices at some of the fastest rates nationally and raising fears of another bubble.

Faced with higher prices and a crowded rental market, investors have been pulling back, triggering a slowdown in Las Vegas’ resale market.

Meanwhile, the market ended 2015 with a jump in December sales but a dip in prices, which had been flat for months.

Single-family homes sold for a median $217,000 in December, down 1.4 percent from November but up 6.4 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors’ resale-heavy listing service.

Before December, the median price of single-family homes had been the same since August, at $220,000, and sales of such homes had dropped each of those months, GLVAR data show.

Real Estate

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