Todd talks about vacant houses in Las Vegas and goes over a recent article that showed exactly how many vacant houses there were.  Vacant houses has been a major concern in Las Vegas because of the big problem with vandalism as well as what may happen when these houses hit the market in the future.

Hello and welcome to Todd Miller TV. Today, I want to talk about the vacant houses in Las Vegas. A report came up recently that was estimating how many houses were vacant and they got this information in an interesting way. Apparently, they somehow found out from the power company how many houses were actually didn’t have power on them. So if a house doesn’t have power that means there’s probably nobody living there because anybody who’s been in Las Vegas knows if it’s a summer time, you have to have power on or the house isn’t livable.

Vacant Houses in Las Vegas

So here’s the report. It’s this little chart and I know it’s hard to see so I’m going to post it on the blog. You’ll be able to just scroll down and look at it. But anyway, for single family homes, it’s about 44,000 single family homes that were vacant. This was just as of about six to eight months ago. Condos almost 15,000 so you’re roughly – that puts you about 60,000 vacant properties. If you add in townhouses of another 4,500 so you got over 60,000 vacant properties in Las Vegas area.

And the question you have to ask yourself is what’s happening with all these properties? So for the most part, the vacant homes – this is what’s going on with them. People during the boom buy houses, maybe bought about three or four and then for whatever reason, they jammed. They left town or they just moved out of it because they thought they were going to get foreclosed. Well, the banks stopped foreclosing because of the National Mortgage Settlement, AB284 and a lot of other reasons.

So now, you got these houses sitting around. They are just sitting there. And it represents roughly 10% of the whole market. If you look at the total number of homes, it’s about 10% of the market so one in ten houses is vacant. And the fear is that these houses will somehow hit the market. But the problem is that’s not going to happen. Not quickly enough is what I believe.

I believe that the vacant homes are going to be slowly absorbed as they get processed. One of the things I do know is that the banks are having people check on the houses. Meaning, they’re going to real estate agents and saying, “Hey, we want you to tell us what we think the house is worth and oh by the way, we want you to tell us whether you think it’s vacant and why.”

So sometimes an agent will go, take pictures of the house, knock on the door, look around, look at the electric meter on the outside, see if it’s flashing, and say, “Hey, we think it’s vacant.” So the bank tracks that and then I’ve seen it where they actually go and have the house rekeyed because they’re trying to protect their interest in the house and they want to make sure that they go check it out vacant houses in las vegas and do things like that.

But the truth is, a lot of these vacant houses are not going to hit the market right away. But there are definitely a lot of vacant houses. What is going to happen with them is definitely subject to interpretation and belief because some people out there are saying, “Hey, these houses are going to come back on the market and it’s going to drive prices down.” But that’s not going to happen all at once. It’s certainly is at hand. Currently, it’s happening at a very low rate. So it will be interesting moving forward to see what happens with these vacant houses in Las Vegas.

So we do have a high vacancy rate. But we also have a high rate of houses as soon as they hit the market, they get sold. So I believe that as these houses come on the market, they’ll just be bought up very quickly. And I don’t believe they will come on the market.

So I thought it was very interesting. This was from the lead institute here in Las Vegas. They came up with all this data. Anyway, I thought that I would share that with you. This is the Las Vegas vacant home trend I guess you could call it. That’s my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks.

Vacant houses in Las Vegas