Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Housing prices continue to increase
Local home prices kept climbing through April as the local housing supply continued contracting, according to a report released today by the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.
GLVAR reported that the median price for existing single-family homes sold in Southern Nevada during April through its Multiple Listing Service was $289,000. That’s up 3.2 percent from the previous month and up 16.1 percent from April of 2017.
“That’s a pretty big jump when you think about a typical marketplace,” said 2018 GLVAR President Chris Bishop, a longtime local Realtor. “And condo and town home prices are up even more than that over the past year.”
The median price of local condos and town homes sold in April was $155,000, up 19.2 percent from the same time last year.
One factor pushing up prices is the increasingly tight housing supply. Bishop said Southern Nevada has about a month-and-a-half supply of existing homes available for sale when a sixmonth supply is considered a balanced market.
“The biggest challenge we have in this market is available inventory, finding properties out there that people are willing to sell,” Bishop explained. “We just don’t have enough inventory to meet demand.”
By the end of April, GLVAR reported 3,816 single-family homes listed for sale without any sort of offer. That’s down 24.9 percent from one year ago. For condos and town homes, the 790 properties listed without offers in April represented a 23.6 percent increase from one year ago.
Bishop suspects more homeowners would consider selling if there were more homes on the market for them to buy. He cited recent surveys by the National Association of Realtors, showing more than 70 percent of U.S. homeowners think it’s a good to time to sell.
The low supply may also be slowing down local home sales, which have been running roughly even with last year’s sales pace so far this year after increasing in recent years. The total number of existing local homes, condos and town homes sold during April was 3,571. Compared to one year ago, April sales were up 0.4 percent for homes and up 4.5 percent for condos and town homes.
GLVAR reported that 27.3 percent of all local properties sold in April were purchased with cash. That compares to 27.5 percent one year ago. That’s well below the February 2013 peak of 59.5 percent, indicating that cash buyers and investors are still active in the local housing market, but have been playing a much smaller role than they were five years ago.
Meanwhile, the number of so-called distressed sales continues to decline. GLVAR reported that short sales and foreclosures combined accounted for 2.5 percent of all existing local home sales in April, down from 8.4 percent of all sales one year ago.
These GLVAR statistics include activity through the end of April 2018. GLVAR distributes statistics each month based on data collected through