Las Vegas Real Estate Market Update

Hello. Welcome to Todd Miller TV. This is a market update for Las Vegas for February of 2013. We’re going to start off with some numbers so I’m just going to show you the numbers here and you’re probably just looking and saying, “Well Todd, they are just numbers. They don’t mean anything.” And the reason they don’t mean anything is because you don’t what they mean. So I’m going to tell you and then we’re going to talk about them, OK? This is a Las Vegas real estate market update.

All right. So the first number at the top here, 4977. What that number represents is that’s the total number of properties available for sale in the Las Vegas area. It includes town homes, condos, single family residences. Some people have taken out and only put single family houses and they’re trying to say, “Hell, there are only 2000 houses on the market.” Well, condos and town homes, they’re also homes for sales. So we’re going to count those too. OK.

Historically, how is this? It’s low. Five years ago, we had 20,000. We did have a point once where it was down to 1700. That was in 2004 when it was similar to how it is now. OK.

Second number here, 13,021. Now, that signifies how many houses were on the market like this but have moved to the next phase which is they’re under contract. So that means that they’re not accepting offers. The buyers going through some process or there’s a short sale taking place and they’re waiting for the bank to give them information. Roughly, 10,000, just under 10,000 of these 13,000 number are short sales under contract. Some of them will close tomorrow and some of them will close who knows? Some of them will never close. They’ll get foreclosed on maybe and move back up to here as an REO at some point in the future. OK? Las Vegas Real Estate Market Update.

The final number here 2,589, that’s the sold from last month. So January of 2013 in Las Vegas, that’s how many sold of all categories, condos, town homes, and everything. So, that’s a really low number and it’s low sort of for two reasons. One is January is not traditionally a huge month for buying. Remember, the houses that closed in January went under contract probably in November and December or were short sales and went under contract some other time.

Plus, it’s driven by this number. They’re just not enough houses on the market to make this a big number. If this number were 10,000 houses available, there would be more of these for two reasons. One, we’ve got investors who want to buy. There’s not enough inventory that makes sense for them so they’re not buying. And two is other people who are frustrated with putting in offers, not getting the offers accepted, doing this five or six times saying it’s the agent’s fault, it’s the market’s fault then they’re running away.

So that’s sort of the market update. I just – that’s the numbers. I’m going to put it down now. So, what do we are going to see going forward which is what everyone wants to know? OK. We’re going to continue to see low inventory. Are there REO coming? Yes. Do we know how long it’s going to take? No clue. It can happen in six months. It can happen in a year. It could slowly happen over five years and not even be noticeable. We do know that almost 60 percent of people here in Las Vegas are upside down in their houses so that’s not encouraging. That will get fixed as prices come up. Some of those people will now not be under water. So – and yes, we leave the nation in that category of Las Vegas Real Estate Market Update.

If you look at the previous video I did, you’ll see the thing where it showed prices heading up. Is it short-term? Is it a temporary thing? Is it going to go down? Is it going to go – we don’t know. My guess is it’s going to continue to rise just for anecdotally what we’re seeing meaning, houses we put under contract today for more than the list price and more than anything sold in subdivision, you won’t find out about that until two or three months or six months from now when somebody looks back and says, “Oh back then, houses are still going up.” We can see it now. We can also see now when houses are flooding the market. So we sort of have that leading indicator. We see the business before it gets recorded and published for everyone else to see.

So I thought I’d share that with you. Once again, my market update for February of 2013 here in Las Vegas. If you have any recommendations, questions, comments, or whatever, on the side, there’s a little “Ask the expert” button. You can hit it now and ask a question. I’ll respond to that.

That is my update and hope to see you on another video. Thanks.

Part of the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Update series.