Las Vegas Homes, Condos, Land and Commercial Real Estate Blog

I keep writing that Las Vegas homes, condominiums or townhome buyers or investors should not pay much attention to Las Vegas real estate market reports and articles in the newspapers.

The following paragraph is from the Las Vegas Review Journal that was published last week.

“In Southern Nevada, home inventory stood at 20,613 in June, compared with 23,388 in the same month a year ago, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. A record 4,702 homes were sold during the month, 74 percent of them foreclosures and 38 percent cash transactions.”

Anyone who reads this will think that Greater Las Vegas home or condo buyers can select from more than 20,000 homes or condos that are available for sale in Las Vegas, if that was true we would be in a buyer’s market and prices would be sinking with double digit numbers. Well, the above numbers are misleading at best, and below is why!

Las Vegas RJ counted contingent sales and pending sales in their number of for sale listings and there lies the problem. When a property is going through pending sale, or even contingent sale, all a buyer can do is to make a back up offer which most of the time will not result in an acceptance from the seller. So the pending sales should not count as available sales. If contingent sales fall through, then they will become available sale listings.

At any rate the number of listings which are available for sale in Las Vegas area through Greater Las Vegas Multiple Listing System (GVAR MLS) as contingent and pending sales are shown in the table below. I have added the number of sold listings for the last 60 days for Las Vegas homes, condos and townhomes so you can see how much inventory we really have.

Now of the 8800 homes that are currently available for sale in Las Vegas (ER) 1790 are foreclosures or bank owned or REPO homes and 3800 are short sales and the rest are regular sales. As for the 2800 Las Vegas condos and town homes, there are 630 foreclosures, 1120 short sales and the rest regular sales. Keep in mind that it is the foreclosures or REOs that put downward pressure on the Las Vegas housing market and as you can see there are not many left.

Since last August 1^st,2008 6370 condos and townhomes and 28630 homes have sold in Greater Las Vegas, 460 condos and townhomes have been short sales and 5045 have been foreclosures. Of the 28630 homes that sold 2980 have been short sales and 20650 foreclosures, the rest were regular sales.  

Let’s look at the numbers for July, 2009. In July the total number of condos and townhomes sold through Las Vegas MLS is 795, only 72 have been short sales, 630 foreclosures and 193 regular sales. The numbers for single family homes are 3130 total sales, 339 short sales, 2238 REOS and 553 regular sales.

Another very important number is the number of foreclosures by banks in the last year (since August, 2008) 32415 homes and condos were foreclosed, 25600 have sold through Las Vegas MLS the difference is 6815 which are yet to hit the market.  I don’t know how many have sold through Las Vegas real estate auctions but for the sake of argument let’s say zero homes or condos have sold in home or condo auctions.

The reason that I say let’s say no home or condos have sold in the auctions is that again Las Vegas newspapers (fear mongers to sell newspapers) are writing that the banks are keeping anywhere from 15,000-30,000 foreclosed homes and condos from hitting the market in order to stabilize the market. I have no idea where they get their numbers from. Even if we say that 3000 homes or condos are left over from more than a year ago, the number of these properties is closer to 10,000, rather than 15,000-30,000.

As you can see from the above numbers we burn through 10,000 foreclosed homes and condos in less than 4 months. The total number of foreclosure sales through Las Vegas MLS since April, 1^st is 11,425.

More on this later.

I have not been able to blog because we are slammed. Karen and I are working double overtime and having a hard time keeping up with inquiries from customers. There is an avalanche of customers but I will try to blog more often.

If you like my blog posts please click on the RSS Feed on the top right hand column and any new blog posts will e-mailed to you as soon I publish it.

I was stupid enough (I am good at this) that I did not put our contact info on the blog and quite a few people have complained that they had to Google my name to find our contact info. I have added the contact info about us in the bottom left hand column. However here is our e-mail address lasvegassaber@yahoo.com and phone number, 702-478-7800.

And at last a sincere apology to those who asked to exchange links with me or added me as a friend, I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Related web-site pages: Getting the best deal for your Las Vegas home or condo, Buying Las Vegas homes for sale, buying Las Vegas condominiums for sale, Las Vegas homes, condominiums, land and commercial properties