Todd does an update to the Las Vegas real estate market for November 2013. The news is that prices are still climbing and inventory is at an 18 month high.

Hello. Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Today is November of 2013 and I just pulled the new numbers from the MLS so I’m going to do a market update today. It’s a very interesting slight change in the market. As most of you know who have been following my blog for the last couple of years, we’ve talked about the inventory shrinking and it has. It has gone down to much less properties.

But today, we actually have the most number of properties on the market that we’ve had in a long time. There’s absolutely 9500, so that’s almost 10,000 properties available for purchase. That includes condos, townhomes, single-family residences all in the Southern Nevada Clark County area.

Now it was down to like 5000. So it’s almost double. So you’ve heard people say, hey, the properties are going to flood the market. But that’s not what this is. This is actually just the return to the normal market and this is why. A normal market has about a six-month inventory of homes. So in a normal market, if there are 3000 home sales in the market, then there should be 18,000 houses on the market. That’s normal.

So our 9500, when you look at how many houses a month are selling in Las Vegas, in the last 30 days, there have been 2900. So it’s almost 3000 sales, so this 9500 is really just a little more than three months of inventory. This is still low and that still means prices are probably going to tend to rise. What’s really surprising about this number is most of those houses on the market are not from banks and they’re not from short sales. They’re equity investors.

Some of the people paid cash and what some of this is, is some is profit-taking because prices have gone up. People decide to rebalance their portfolios through selling their real estate. Investors selling the property or somebody moving.

But some of these are move-up buyers and so this is what happens. Somebody who bought a house two or three years ago now has equity they didn’t have and they actually have enough equity to go do – buy another house and put more money down so that their payment is less. They’re getting a better loan, 20 percent down kind of a thing. They will pay PMI. So what they’re doing is we’re seeing the move-up buyer and they’ve returned to the market. So what they do is they put their house in the market and then once they get an offer accepted, they go and buy another house.

So we’ve seen more homes come on the market but this is a normal market. This is actually a normal, healthy market. This is what the market is supposed to do. So inventory is higher than it was but it was really low and now actually homes sit on the market for a reasonable amount of time before they get off or for them to sell.

So I called this like at least 18 months ago on this blog and I said the markets stabilized. REO boom is over. We went through that down part of prices bottoming out and then inventory going away which caused prices to go up and now prices are starting to level off and go back to that normal appreciation every year and we’re still well below where we – where historically where we probably should be right now.

But these are encouraging numbers, 9500 homes on the market. This is actually a decent amount of inventory to go out there and look. There’s probably something for everybody in all price ranges. Still good deals for investors and with 2900 houses a month roughly that are being purchased through the MLS. That’s not bad. It’s still three months of inventory. It’s still on the low side but we’re not going to see a flood of properties. We’ve had the Homeowner Bill of Rights and things like that that are going to stop the massive amounts of foreclosures that people have said that are going to happen.

If you watch my other videos, I went into detail about this, where the total number of properties in the US that were delinquent dropped by a million in the last year. It went from like six and a half to five and a half million.

So I called that. I stepped out on a limb 18 months ago and called it and said the REO boom is over. We’re out of the woods for this potential. Some of these might be the hedge funds selling or securitizing and trying to move the money around. I don’t know. But most of it is equity sellers. They own the properties without debt on them.

So anyway I thought I would share that with you. That’s interesting for update for November of 2013 here in Las Vegas. That is my update and hope to see you on another video. Thanks.