Allison Krueger
VIVA LAS VEGAS - HOME MARKET AHEAD OF REST OF USA
Why is the Las Vegas home market accelerating so much more than the rest of the nation?
The answer is that folks are leaving expensive coastal markets like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and moving to places like Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. Our home prices were rising fast due to our expanding population and strengthened job markets.
Las Vegas new home closings were up 14% from 2017. Single family housing starts up 1.5% nationwide and yet higher in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas resale housing market ended 2018 with fast-rising prices. The median home price rose from $299,000 to $313,000. However February’s 1,966 resales adjusted the median price to $296,200 according to Greater Las Vegas Area Realtor’s stats.
January 2019 there were 2,254 Single Family home sales and volume of $1,425,814,928. January 2018 there were Single Family home 2,744 sales and volume of $1,528,011,619. January is usually a slow month. Single Family home sales in Las Vegas and Henderson were 490 less sales this year than January 2018.
Southern Nevada home prices were up 11.4 percent year over year in December, more than double the national rate of 4.7 percent, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index released Tuesday by S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Las Vegas growth rate was fastest among the 20 markets in the report for the seventh consecutive month, and it was the only metro area with double-digit year-over-year price gains in December.
SNAPSHOT OF 2018
HOMEBUILDERS
Meanwhile, homebuilders last year closed the most sales in Southern Nevada in more than a decade and fetched record prices. But they started 2019 with the fewest monthly closings in two years.
Builders closed 611 new-home sales in January, down 13.9 percent from a year earlier and the lowest tally since January 2017, according to a report Monday from Home Builders Research.
Home Builders Research President Andrew Smith wrote in a report that closings should post year-over-year declines “for the next few months” due to relatively slower sales in the second half of last year.
But overall, Southern Nevada’s homebuilding market “is performing well enough to temper some of the growing concerns” that many people felt last quarter, he said.
Smith noted that builders pulled 984 new-home permits last month, up 8 percent from a year earlier, and that sales contracts fell 4.4 percent year-over-year in January, a “pleasant surprise” given the “somewhat frighteningly low totals in November and December.”
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