Question of the Day - 12 May 2022

If you've been following the continuous rises on our Vegas News section, you'll know that the price of Las Vegas used single-family houses, townhomes and condos, and new houses sets a new record month after month after month after month. In April, the median price of an existing single-family house was up again, this time to $475,000, $15,000 more than in March. It's also up exactly $100,000 (26%) year over year.

Even though mortgage rates have nearly doubled in the past year and Las Vegas’ home prices climb faster than in most other cities around the U.S., availability remains tight and demand is still strong, so the boom continues. However, some signs of a slowdown are showing up. Inventory of homes for sale is going up and fairly quickly; in April, there were 22% more houses for sale than in March. The long trend of rising prices, now combined with interest rates ratcheting up, of course, looks like it could be starting to reverse; houses are starting to sit on the market a little longer, which is worrisome to sellers, especially if they've priced their properties too high, and helpful to buyers, who have more time to get in.

For now, though, rents continue to rise as investors scoop up houses and convert them from owner-occupied to rental properties, raising monthly costs all along the line. And evictions for non-payment follow closely behind. Lower-income workers are definitely feeling the pinch of inflation in all sectors. 

As for foreclosures, the last statistics we saw locally were for the third-quarter of 2021, when the Las Vegas metropolitan area had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. According to the real estate analytics firm ATTOM Data Solutions, among the 220 metro areas the company analyzed, one in every 1,167 Las Vegas homes was in foreclosure in the third quarter, the fifth-highest total in the country. Other metro areas in the top 5 five were Atlantic City, Peoria (Illinois), Bakersfield, and Cleveland.

To wrest information from ATTOM, you have to subscribe, so we have only data that's been reported, but with the federal and state moratoria on foreclosures due to COVID long over and national numbers we've seen, we can confidently state that the Las Vegas numbers have gone up in the past two quarters. To paraphrase an old saying, when the economy sneezes, Las Vegas is the first to catch a very bad cold.