Las Vegas Real Estate Market Overview

Good morning and welcome to Todd Miller TV, your resource for what’s current in the Las Vegas real estate market and I’m going to do an overview of 2010 as far as the highs and lows for all the different property types so you can get a feel for where properties are selling in Las Vegas.

I’m going to start off right now into the bottom end. We’re just going to talk about condos. OK. Condos you probably imagine is something three stories or less, not high rise condos. Low end condos, something that tends to be in residential or commercial areas, tend to be investment properties in this range. You can live it in though.

The low end condo was a property that was a 770 square foot two-bedroom, one-bath sold for eight grand. It was actually $8000 and it just needed a little work. It wasn’t that bad. The exterior of the building was fine. It wasn’t that old of a building. It was built in ’75, 35 years old, so not ridiculously old.

So for $8000 you can have yourself a nice little investment property or a place to live. As far as the bottom end for single family residents, now you probably heard in Detroit you can get a house for a thousand bucks. You can’t get that in Vegas. We still have some value here but the bottom end home was actually 1280 square foot, two-bedroom, one-bath built in 1940.

The house needs some work. It was not a livable house but the house sold for $10,000. So you’ve got a 6000 square foot lot with a 1200 square foot house on it that needed probably 10 to 20 grand of work. So there you go.

Bottom end high rise, if you go down – and I’m not talking condo hotels because condo hotels you cannot move into. OK? Bottom end high rise, there’s a building downtown called Newport Lofts. It’s a not a bad building. It’s in the Arts District. You can walk to downtown. It’s a decent area. On the 10th floor, a unit that was a 800 square foot, one-bedroom, one-bath unit, tenth floor sold for $78,000. You can live downtown for 78 grand. Keep in mind you’re going to be paying some HOA fees. I think they’re like 700 or 800 bucks a month. They’re pretty high. So monthly HOA fees are what’s going to get you there, what makes it hard to rent those out when you get that.

All right. So now that’s kind of the bottom of the real estate market. So we’re going to talk about the high end. Now the high end, we got two winners. First in condo, high rise condos, there’s a building downtown, four buildings actually. It’s called Turnberry Towers. One of the penthouse units sold this year. This was an exceptional unit. As you know in the high rises, they have tennis courts and swimming pools and things like that.

Well this unit sitting on the roof basically had its own private pool in addition to having 6400 square feet of living space and unbelievable views of the city. That sold for $5 million. So that’s the high end. It doesn’t get any more than that. They’re really worth that many sales above, about three million in the high end market. There were probably half a dozen.

So there are definitely some deals there and as much inventory as there is, above a million, a million to three million, we can expect to see those values tend to drop.

The overall total highest sale in Las Vegas that you’ve probably seen the reports from other cities where they still have $30 million, $40 million sales, Malibu and New York City, places like that. The absolute highest sale here in Las Vegas was this place right over about two miles from our office in Red Rock Country Club, a neighborhood called The Ridges which is guard-gated. It’s a very nice neighborhood, all custom homes, and very big lots. These are amazing homes. This home was no exception. It was a 13,000 square foot home, tri-level, beautiful views of the city on almost an acre with a pool and a spa and the whole thing. Highly upgraded home, originally listed for 14 million; final sale price after price reduction, price reduction down to 7 million.

So that’s Las Vegas real estate market for you. Seven million is the high end. Ten grand or so, eight to ten grand is the low end. There’s still a lot of opportunity in the middle there for investments or just for buying. So that’s my update and thanks for tuning in.