Las Vegas home sales surge in June as prices continue to fall

Sam Morris / Las Vegas Sun file

Houses sprawl across the Las Vegas Valley. When the housing bubble burst in 2007, Las Vegas became the No. 1 area in foreclosures nationwide.

The demand for bank-owned properties in June spurred a jump in Southern Nevada home sales to one of its best levels in history, although prices fell even further.

The Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported today that the 3,629 sales of single-family homes on the Multiple Listing Service were up 16.7 percent over May and were 8 percent higher than June 2010.

Even condo and town home sales rose in June, with 911 sales, 3.5 percent higher than May and 0.7 percent higher than June 2010.

Combined, that’s 4,540 sales of homes and condos, up from 3,991 in May and up from 4,265 in June 2010.

GLVAR President Paul Bell said the June sales figures were the third-best month ever for existing homes in Southern Nevada using the Realtor-based MLS. Non-Realtor transactions will be released later in the month by local research firms.

Foreclosures continue to drive the market with the GLVAR reporting 47.2 percent of existing home sales in June were bank-owned properties, up from 43.8 percent in May. In a sign that investor activity remains strong, some 50 percent of homes sold in June were purchased with cash, down from 51.4 percent in May.

The median price of existing homes sold in June was $124,500, a 1.2 percent decline from May’s $126,000. The median price is 11.1 percent lower than June 2010.

The median price of condos and town homes was $59,900 in June, down 4.5 percent from $62,750 in May and down 14.4 percent in the past year.

The prices are driven by foreclosures, with the median price of bank-owned homes sold in June at $109,000. Those homes that sold via short sales went for a median price of $129,000, the GLVAR reported.

In June, 21.6 percent of existing homes sold were short sales in which the bank agrees to sell the property for less than is owed on the mortgage. That’s down from a peak of 34 percent in June 2010.

Prices are expected to continue falling until Las Vegas works its way through the supply of foreclosure inventory, and there’s no sign of that happening yet.

California-based Clear Capital released its market report today that forecasts the price drop will slow in Las Vegas in the second half of the year. It predicts a 2.4 percent decline in Las Vegas prices between July and December compared to a 6.1 percent drop between January and June of this year.

The 2.4 percent decline is the same as the forecast for the nation as a whole.

The inventory of single-family homes fell slightly in June to 22,702, down 0.3 percent from May. About half of those homes don’t have offers on them.

The 4,916 new listings of homes were 2.7 percent lower than May.

The GLVAR tracks sales in Clark, Nye, Lincoln and White Pine counties.

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