Las Vegas Sun NewsLas Vegas home prices fall to February 1998 levels
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29 November 2011
8:31 a.m.
Las Vegas-area home prices fell again in September to a new low during the current recession, Standard & Poor’s reported Tuesday.
Stung by elevated unemployment and high levels of foreclosures and underwater mortgages, Las Vegas saw housing prices fall 1.4 percent from August and 7.3 percent from September 2010, Standard & Poor’s said.
Data from Standard & Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices show Las Vegas-area prices are now at levels last seen in February 1998 after September’s decline.
Of 20 big U.S. markets tracked by Standard & Poor’s, the average decline from August was 0.6 percent while the year-to-year decline was 3.6 percent.
“It is a bit disturbing that we saw three cities post new crisis lows. For the prior three or four months, only Las Vegas was weakening each month. Now Atlanta and Phoenix have fallen to new lows too,” Standard & Poor’s analyst David Blitzer said in a statement.
Overall, he said, “Any chance for a sustained recovery will probably need a stronger economy.”
Prices locally peaked in April 2006 and have tumbled during the recession. While the pricing slide locally has been interrupted by occasional months with increases, Standard & Poor’s data show September’s decline was the eighth consecutive month prices have fallen locally.
Tuesday’s report is in line with others showing unemployment running at 13.1 percent in the Las Vegas area and the city is still experiencing an elevated level of foreclosures.
Tuesday's data follows release of statistics by the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors Nov. 8 finding that in October, the median price of single-family homes sold locally was $121,000. That was down 1.9 percent from $123,400 in September and down 9 percent from $133,000 in October 2010.
Also Tuesday, mortgage data provider CoreLogic reported that at the end of the third quarter, Nevada had the highest negative equity percentage in the nation with 58 percent of its mortgaged properties underwater, down from 60 percent in the second quarter.
In the Las Vegas-Paradise Metropolitan Statistical Area, 61 percent, or 257,345 of residential properties with a mortgage, were underwater, CoreLogic reported.
That’s an improvement from the 63.3 percent negative equity figure for Las Vegas in the second quarter.
These numbers compare to 22.1 percent of homes with mortgages being underwater nationwide, down from 22.5 percent in the second quarter.
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I wonder how Henderson is on this comparison. I don't see many houses for sale at all in my area.
The reason why prices have fallen is because mostly the buyers are investors. Everybody else has to compete with them but don't or not willing to put up the cash to buy right out. HUD and Nevada Housing are a joke. They have these programs set up so they can claim they are trying to revitalize the market but it's all a scam. HUDs real policy is to sell the houses as quickly as they can for whatever they can get in the shortest period. If you have cash, great, otherwise forget it. Why doesn't the sun do a story on that for a change! Don't believe me. Just check the recorders website for your own neighborhood and prove me wrong.
jafo - To add to that the realtors won't even show you a house unless you are paying cash. Then they only want to show you 3-4 homes and you never hear from them again.
It is an investors market right now, and unfortunetly the quality of realtors is probably the worst in the market.
That all being said, if you can get past them, you will get a smoking deal in the best city in America for low cost of living.
Another report that isn't a huge surprise. Expect this to get worse once the Euro dies and the banks here will be in more desperate shape to get rid of the shadow inventory of foreclosed homes.
another reminder about how Nevada's housing experts were all very wrong. Remember when they said we reached the bottom at $190,000?
How Low can they go? Ask any of the 13% listed unemployed or actual 20%+ unemployed. Or any of the Employed that cannot refinance since you now have to prove to Banks you absolutely don't need their money. Or any of the Casino Corporations that have dropped debt by the hundreds of millions. And they all will give you the same answer.
Jobs - Jobs - Jobs.
Too bad it's a four letter word to the Republicans filibustering in the Senate and House Majority Leader Boehner who has not even introduced a single bill to help.
I don't understand this at all - the "housing market" in the USA. Maybe I'm not supposed to know. We realize, also, unemployment, interest rates, location of the home, area employment, area job potentiality, selling droops and loops!
As I did a one-year contract in Harlingen, Texas, we wanted another home. We had a home in Lufkin, Texas, just above Houston. That home was priced in the $750,000.00 range, on a golf course, and was within two years of a payoff.
We enjoyed the Gulf and the home sites outside of Harlingen and decided to relocate from the piney forests of Lufkin to the oceanside of the Gulf for retirement. So, our home search began. This was in 1998!
Much to our amazement when we saw a home price at $1,225,000.00, the real estate agency said we had to sell our home in Lufkin before we bought the new one. The banks would not "take up the new one"...and we wondered, if we can afford the Lufkin home with only 24 months to pay the note/mortgage, and we were putting half of the new home cost cash down...the banks would not "take us"? We were a "risk". (?)
We were actually putting a down payment of earnest funds of half of the price of the new home, but they began to give us blather about high interest, low interest, my employment risk as I was going to reach retirement age in a year, (forget the banking accounts and portfolios and all the securities and investments we had...) amortization, home values and the reduction of our home worth in Lufkin per a "new" government HUD percentage reduction, and quoted some laws or something out of some book, and what we thought was a clean sale, was ridiculous. They said our home in Texas was to be sold at 22% below the assessed rate. We are not investors; we retain the home for ourselves.
We said to blazes with it all, already 'peed at the brokers, the bank and the RE agent...as I was deciding to be retired after the contract was finished and living in an efficiency apartment in Harlingen for the 9 months left on the contract, while the wife just lived in Lufkin with our son, and I visited (by plane) every weekend.
There is too much hassel in buying or selling a home nowadays - you lose! Someone I think is getting the top-end money. They wait like vultures for foreclosures. Even when we finally sold the home in Lufkin in 2000 and relocated overseas to a foreign country to retire in, we were lucky enough to sell the home for what it was worth to a private buyer out of New York City. He even told us not to advertise it through a realtor; they get enough massive profits all the way around, and the banks also make a killing. Just get an attorney and have him/her work the deal up. Maybe that's the way to go...but not in the US any longer...cash or financing...it is a hard road for some.