Todd gives a market update for Las Vegas real estate for June 2013.

Hello. Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Update today, this is the market update for July. Yes, I realized we’re a little halfway through the month or I’m sorry, for June, June 2013. We’re halfway through the month but it had been a couple of weeks since I’ve done a video, so I’m doing a video.

OK. So probably starting a year and a half ago, I was doing monthly market updates and the two numbers I was giving everybody, total number of houses on the market, total, including houses, condos, townhomes, total sales on the market including all of them. The total number on the market is 5200. It’s about the same as it has been. It hasn’t changed substantially. It’s a little more than it was. It was 4800 for a while, 4700.

Number of sales in the last month, 3668. That’s 30 days. So we’ve got a very – that’s a shortage. That’s a very small number. What it represents is if we didn’t put a new house in the market in less than two months, there would be no houses, anything for sale.

But this number hasn’t changed. So what that means is this is an equilibrium. It’s a low equilibrium but it has been steady and in equilibrium, I mean it’s the equilibrium for the current market. Now this equilibrium though has caused prices to rise. That’s the way it has maintained that. So prices have risen and that has caused people to want to buy more, so some of the frenzy to buy is because prices are going up.

So that’s sort of what’s happening here. The other thing that’s happening here is a large part of the marketplace meaning a large number of houses are not transactable meaning that you can’t buy them. They’re locked up. They’re either – it’s a seller who won’t sell because they bought investment property and they’re going to keep it forever which is one of the downsides of investor buyers is they tend to tie up the market for a long period of time. Investor buyers tend to own a house longer than the owner buy tend to own a house.

Then the other problem is you have the – all the legislation that’s happening that’s going to make it even harder for people that are upside down to – banks to sell those houses that foreclose. So it’s more incentive for those people to stay in the house and of course they’re upside down and they’re not paying and there are all these incentives for them to stay. They don’t want to sell. They just leave it empty or they just live in it for free.

So that’s persisting. It’s going to persist. So we’ve talked about this now for over a year. It hasn’t changed. Don’t expect it to change. There’s a flood of houses that a year and a half ago people said we would hit the market in nine months or a year. It never happened. It’s not going to happen. There are not going to be a flood of houses. It has now become so fragmented between all the other institutional purchases that are buying houses that the banks have sold off a lot of their notes to other entities, whoever they may be. They’re sitting on them, that there’s no organized way that all these houses are going to hit the market.

So bottom line, this is sort of my prediction moving forward. Inventory will stay low. Prices will continue to creep up. Are they going to be at one or two percent a month? Don’t know. Is it going to flat line at some point? Don’t know. Is it going to go down? Don’t know. But we’ve looked at what has happened over the last year and a half and it has pretty much set the pace. So I think that we’re going to continue to see this.

So the bottom line is you shouldn’t be making a buying decision on a real estate like a stock decision because the transaction costs in and out are too much and you should be looking for long term investment on investment property. If you’re going to live in it, find a house that you want to live in that you like and don’t worry about whether it’s going to go up or stay the same or just buy the house for the reasons that make sense and not trying to sharp shoot the system because that doesn’t work.

So that’s my market update for June 2013 here in Las Vegas and I hope to see you on another video. Thanks.