Real estate investors aren’t flipping homes in Nevada as often as last year, but they’re still more active than flippers nationally, a new report shows.
Some 7.7 percent of single-family home sales statewide in the three months ended Sept. 30 were flips, down from 9.5 percent in the same period last year, according to RealtyTrac.
Nationally, 4 percent of single-family home sales last quarter were flips, down from 5.6 percent a year earlier, RealtyTrac reported.
The Irvine, Calif.-based housing-data firm defines flipping as selling a house within 12 months of buying it.
Flipping slowed nationally to its “historic norm” last quarter amid cooling home-price growth in markets where flipping had been popular, RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist said in the report.
The get-rich-quick tactic helped push Las Vegas home prices to absurd heights in the boom years. After the bubble burst, investors flocked here to buy cheap homes in bulk to turn into rentals, pulling the market out from the depths of the recession and causing prices to rise at one of the fastest rates nationally. But lately, the market has been cooling as investors, faced with fewer bargains, pull back.
Listings of previously owned homes increasingly are being ignored, sales volume is dropping and prices aren’t climbing nearly as fast as a year ago.
The number of single-family homes listed for sale but without offers has more than doubled the past two years, to about 8,200 as of September, according to data from the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors’ listing service.
Roughly 22,300 single-family homes on the listing service were sold this year through September, down 13 percent from the same period last year.
Meanwhile, the median sales price for a single-family home in September was $202,500, up 12.5 percent from a year earlier — but the median price then was up 29 percent from fall 2012, according to the GLVAR.