FOR SALE - Las Vegas

The millionaires of Las Vegas are selling their mansions.

Ref: BloombergNews (includes video)

Lowlights:

__Nicolas Cage's $8.5million house foreclosed; sold by bank for $4.2million.

__In the first quarter [of 2011], 30 Clark County homes with loans exceeding $1 million were repossessed by banks or bought by third-parties in foreclosure sales. Short sales, in which the bank agrees to accept less than the loan balance, and bank-owned properties accounted for about three-quarters of all home sales, according to the Las Vegas Realtors.

__"I gave up on Vegas, there’s no opportunity for anything in this town that I can see.”__Eric Petersen, owner of Consumer Credit Services Inc., a Las Vegas-based catalog-merchandising company that closed in 2008, listing the home, in which he invested $34million, for $25million.

__Almost 70 percent of Las Vegas-area homeowners with mortgages were underwater at the end of 2010.


DonDiego counsels patience in considering Las Vegas real estate.

The Highlights:

"While high-end homes fall in price, total residential- property sales have accelerated, rising 8.2 percent in March from a year earlier to 4,316 units, the Las Vegas Realtors reported. More than half of this year’s purchases were all-cash transactions, a sign that investors are finding bargains at the low end of the market, said Robert Lang, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "


“Prices are below the cost of materials and labor,” said Lang, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If you’re betting the U.S. economy won’t go back to Armageddon, you might see one-third appreciation if you buy now.”


DD is right, "patience". Although, barring "Armageddon" one-third appreciation sounds tempting.