News for Las Vegas Real Estate , Lake Las Vegas Real Estate, Henderson Real Estate and Summerlin Real Estate

July 27,2008

Ban expected on Nehemiah down-payment program

A signature Sacramento program that has helped almost 300,000 lower-income people nationally buy homes in the past decade – while stirring controversy for years – is likely to be shut down this week, Nehemiah Corp. of America officials acknowledged Monday.

The nonprofit giant believes Congress and President Bush will ban its decade-old down-payment assistance "gift" program within days as part of a larger housing bill, Nehemiah President and Chief Executive Officer Scott Syphax said Monday.

Syphax said he met Monday with the Nehemiah board and about 30 down-payment assistance employees in Sacramento to say it's likely the "doors are closing" on the program. But Syphax said it's not the end of the nonprofit started a decade ago at Antioch Progressive Baptist Church in south Sacramento to help its lower-income members buy houses.

"Nehemiah is very solid in terms of everything else, and we have prepared for this day over the past two years," he said.

The firm has steadily remade itself into an urban developer, with an eye on building nearly 3,000 residential units just north of downtown Sacramento. Recently, it received $19 million in state housing bond funds for its 65-acre development, called Township 9.

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December 12,2007

A glimmer of hope for LV housing

Sales stats seen as indication bottom of slump is near

"Prices are still dropping, in large part because investors are buying up the best deals," she said. "But with sales flat and pending sales rising, it shouldn't be long before prices stabilize and begin to climb as excess inventory is absorbed. Prices are still dropping while sales are rising. I think we have an ideal buyers' market that won't last much longer."

November 15,2007

New filings for foreclosures rise in September

Nevada at top of list for ninth month in a row

Nevada reported one foreclosure filing for every 185 households, earning the state the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for the ninth month in a row. The state had 5,504 filings in September, down 11.1 percent from August and more than triple from September 2006.

Despite the sequential decline, the September figure represents the second-highest total for filings in a single month since the company began tracking monthly filings two years ago.

"August was an extraordinarily high month for foreclosure activity, so some falloff was almost predictable," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president for marketing.

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May 20, 2007

RETAIL: Hip to be Square. Developer believes Town Square will draw crowds, inspire urban planners

own Square, a 1.5 million-square-foot "super-regional lifestyle center" scheduled to open Nov. 14 in Las Vegas, is poised to become a prototype for retail development nationwide, an executive for the developer predicts.

The project, going up on Las Vegas Boulevard South, will change the way local residents and tourists experience shopping and dining in Las Vegas, said Joe Tagliola, retail president of Aventura, Fla.-based Turnberry Associates.

He said he's sure the $600 million project, originally scheduled for completion in 2006, will be a high-profile topic among the 50,000 people attending the International Council of Shopping Centers spring show that starts today at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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Feb. 19, 2007

THE STRIP: Help wanted, a lot of it

Casino operators believe they will have no problem filling hotel rooms with guests and packing casinos with free-spending gamblers during the current building boom, which is expected to bring at least four new resorts to the Strip and an estimated 45,000 more hotel rooms to the Las Vegas market by 2012.

REAL ESTATE: Las Vegas home prices drop

Median dips 2 percent in December; inventory falls for second straight month

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Click image for enlargement.
Graphic by Mike Johnson.

Las Vegas median home prices dropped to $306,100 in December, down 2 percent from the same month a year ago, and the inventory of homes for sale shrank for the second straight month to 17,834, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported Monday.

Realtors sold 1,644 single-family homes during the month, a The number of homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service decreased 9.6 percent from 19,729 in November and is down from a record high 23,474 in October. It's still up by a third from last year.

Devin Reiss, new president of the Realtors association, said this year is going to be about "balance in the market." He expects to see a continued reduction in housing inventory without a significant drop in home values. GLVAR statistics show home prices have remained stable for the past 14 months.

"Prices have decreased so slightly that it's hard to believe that we can expect anything other than the status quo for this market through 2007," Reiss said. "The continued decrease in housing inventory shows that the scale is tipping toward a more balanced market than what we saw last fall."

The GLVAR statistics are based on data collected through the Multiple Listing Service and do not necessarily account for newly constructed homes sold by local builders, sales by owner and other transactions not involving a Realtor.

The median price of a condo or townhouse is off 4.4 percent at $195,000 and the number of units for sale is up 86.2 percent to 4,833. There were 372 condo sales in December, down 36.6 percent.

While national studies continue to predict double-digit declines, Reiss said there is nothing that suggests prices will drop significantly in Southern Nevada.

"Many have said that 2006 was a bad year for the Las Vegas housing market, yet this was a year that saw very little change in the median housing prices," Reiss said. "While we do not discount the national studies that have come out, we recognize that the studies do not take into account local economic conditions, such as lack of private land for development and the continued job and population growth that make Southern Nevada different from other parts of the country."

Debi Averett of Phoenix-based Housingdoom.com said she hears that Las Vegas housing analysts dodge the "bubble" issue all the time, some of them saying the downturn is simply a "blip on the radar."

She points to what happened in Phoenix with the savings and loan crisis. Average single-family home prices peaked in the first quarter of 1987 at $93,000 and fell by 7.5 percent between 1987 and a low point in the fourth quarter of 1990 at $86,000, a four-year downturn in appreciation. Prices gradually rose after that and returned to the $93,000 mark in 1993.

"People that managed to hang onto their properties throughout that period did fine. People who picked up cheap properties during that time made some tidy profits," Averett said. "However, the S and L's went under and foreclosures around here were rampant. A lot of damage happened during that time period. Some people who didn't want to miss the boat ended up losing their boat at a foreclosure sale."

HOME VALUES: LV bucks national trend

Analyst says Southern Nevada prices stable

By JENNIFER ROBISON
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Someday, Larry Murphy will be able to stop talking about housing bubbles.

Thursday wasn't that day.

At his third-quarter Crystal Ball seminar and forecast, Murphy, president of the Las Vegas real estate research firm SalesTraq, once again declared that Southern Nevada isn't experiencing a housing bust. He shared reams of data showing that housing prices in Las Vegas are rising, and will likely continue to do so at least through the end of the year. In the third quarter of 2007, he said, analysts may even be discussing local housing shortages.

The median new-home price in the Las Vegas Valley was $323,000 in September, a 7.7 percent increase when compared with the median in September 2005.

Existing homes posted a 0.4 percent appreciation rate, with the median price parked at about $285,000 from September 2005 to the end of the most recent quarter. That small gain in value came despite a big jump in inventory: The Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors pegged resale inventory in September at 20,815 units, up 57.4 percent from the same month a year ago.

"In the long term, housing prices in Las Vegas have continued to go up," Murphy said. "If you measure hour to hour or day to day, you'll see fluctuations. But year to year, the Las Vegas housing market is perfectly healthy and intact."

Murphy called for a "paradigm shift" in how locals view resale supply.

He said resale inventory from January 2003 to April 2004 stayed below 5,000 units, and local market watchers tend to think of those supply levels as typical for the market. But with up to 7,000 people a month moving to the valley, he said, that low inventory caused a "housing crisis" that led local home prices to nearly double in 2003 and 2004.

Today's for-sale inventory of nearly 21,000 units represents about 3.5 percent of the valley's base of 650,000 houses.

"In a metropolitan area of 1.8 million people, 20,000 listings is very normal," Murphy said. "I think inventories will stay at that level or go higher. We have to change our thinking on what's normal."

Local real estate statistics through September reveal an increasingly sluggish performance as the year has worn on.

When compared with the same quarter a year earlier, new-home sales were up 3 percent in the first quarter, flat in the second quarter and down 15 percent in the third quarter. Resales were up 2 percent in the first quarter, down 22 percent in the second quarter and down 35 percent in the third quarter.

Murphy predicts local builders will sell 35,000 homes in 2006 -- their second-best year, Murphy said, after the 38,705 units they moved in 2005.

The 43,000 valley resales he's forecasting in 2006 would rank fourth behind sales of existing homes in 2005 (54,698 units), 2004 (55,408 units) and 2003 (46,116 units).

The 78,000-sale total Murphy is estimating would be the local housing market's third-best performance, after the 93,409 homes sold in 2005 and the 84,595 homes sold in 2004.

Murphy said housing prices wouldn't change noticeably through the end of 2006. Resale prices should stay at a median of $285,000, while new-home prices would rise $2,000 to a median of $325,000.

The city's real estate market could get hotter in the next year, though, Murphy said.

Builders, cautious about overbuilding in the market, are averaging far fewer local construction permits than they have in recent years. Residential building permits are down 20.5 percent in 2006 when compared with permits pulled in 2005. Permits fell 54.5 percent year over year in September, from 2,121 permits to 964 permits.

Not even after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when builders halted construction to gauge whether consumers would continue buying homes, did local permits fall below 1,000 in any month, Murphy said.

"Builders have stopped pulling permits like never before," he said. "Prepare for the next housing shortage."

With 6,000 to 7,000 new residents a month moving to Las Vegas, and with household formation among existing Las Vegans, builders should build 3,000 units a month to keep up with demand, Murphy said.

"A year from now, we could be talking about another shortage," he said.

Steve Bottfeld, a senior analyst with the Las Vegas research firm of Marketing Solutions, said local job growth and economic diversification are strong, and both should sustain demand for housing.

With a current job-formation rate of 5.3 percent, Nevada far outpaces the nation's 1.3 percent average, he said, adding that no other state is above 4 percent in job growth. Also, he said, employment in the resort sector has dropped from 25.5 percent of the state's job base in 1990 to 19.4 percent today, making the area less reliant on the fortunes of the gaming industry. And the $25 billion in new developments planned in the next four years on the Strip will drive future economic growth.

Bottfeld also noted that predictions earlier this year of catastrophe for the local housing market haven't born out. Reports from national magazines forecasting a drop in median prices of 8 percent to 20 percent in 2006 will prove wrong even if appreciation flattens for the rest of the year.

"The sky is not falling," he said.

In other seminar notes:

• Murphy said there's no longer any easy response when people ask him for the median home value in Las Vegas.

Condominiums converted from apartments carried a median price of $194,000 in September. Existing homes were at a median of $285,000, while new homes were at $323,000. If you exclude condo conversions from the new-home submarket, the median jumps to $346,000. And mid-rise and high-rise homes are selling for a median of $400,000.

• One housing segment missing from Murphy's report: Homes that sold for less than $100,000. That price range "is extinct" in Las Vegas. "The new 'affordable' is anything under $200,000," he said.

• The Las Vegas market has one of the nation's most eco-friendly housing markets, Bottfeld said.

More than two-thirds -- 67.7 percent -- of new homes built in Southern Nevada are certified through Energy Star, a federal Environmental Protection Agency program that focuses on home elements such as power-conserving appliances and weather-deflecting insulation and windows. No other market in the United States breaks 35 percent in the share of new homes belonging to Energy Star, Bottfeld said.

• The starting price per square foot of the city's mid-rise and high-rise sector has jumped significantly, from $342 in the first quarter of 2004 to $596 in the third quarter. Much of the increase is because failed projects whose prices were too low to cover rising construction costs are no longer factored into Murphy's reports."If you see a project with base prices under $500 (per square foot), that's a big red flag," Murphy said. "At those prices, they won't get built."

• The lion's share of publicity covering the city's mid-rise and high-rise market focuses on projects on and around the Strip. SalesTraq's research shows, however, that most units planned or under construction are off-Strip. The Strip has 19,243 units planned or under way, compared with 5,012 units downtown, 5,046 units on Las Vegas Boulevard south of Mandalay Bay, 7,905 units in the Harmon Road Corridor east of the Strip and 22,660 units across the rest of the valley.