December 2012 Las Vegas real estate market update: Episode #284

Hello. Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Today we’re going to do a market update, December 2012. It’s actually the end of November. We’re going to recap really what happened in November so it’s beginning of December market update.

So if you’ve been following these, I do these every month and I use a bunch of statistics and graphs but something very interesting first. About six months, there hasn’t been much of a change in either inventory or in sales. Right now, there are 5500 homes on the market. That includes single families, condos, and that does not include high rise. It didn’t pull high rise numbers, different market.

But there are probably a few hundred of those and then there were 3200 sales in the last month. So basically we have like two months of inventory.

Now one thing that’s very interesting is that the new inventory every month is exactly being bought meaning there’s 3200 or so homes that hit the market every month and those all get absorbed. So this 5500 number is not the same 5500 houses.

Some of them have been on the market for a while but what’s interesting is that everything is getting purchased. I mean I even hear anecdotal stories where people say, “We were making offers in short sales over list price. There were multiple offers.”

So where it used to be known if you want to make an offer in the short sale, they had to be super low-priced. So what we expect is we expect this to stay the same. We don’t see any major market force is going to change this. We still don’t know about the Tax Relief Act and if that’s going to get extended or not. That could have an effect certainly because it makes more sense probably to get foreclosed than to do a short sale. I mean who knows.

We keep hearing of all these REOs to hit the market but the NODs haven’t changed substantially. We get a thousand or a little more a month but we’re not seeing that yet and we’re not seeing it in our REO. We’re still getting the same number of REOs now that we got six months ago which is not a ton every month.

So right now, status quo, I foresee probably four months of this still happening. What this means for those of you out there is it’s going to be hard to buy properties. You’re not going to be able to get the $70,000 three-bedroom houses that rent for 1000 or 1100 bucks. They’re not out there.

If you do make an offer, expect a lot of other people to make offers on those as well. We still have a strong rental market so people are still renting properties and many investors are having no problems getting tenants in there and keeping them in.

So it’s just kind of status quo. I don’t know what this means historically or long term. It means prices are going to go up. They’re going to go down. Right now they’re going up. They’re clearly going up because every time a home comes on the market, it sells for a little more than the previous one and we’re talking about homes right in that price range of probably $100,000 to $200,000 which is where most the sales are happening.

So I thought I would share that with you. That’s my Las Vegas real estate market update for December of 2012 and thanks for tuning in.

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