Real estate:

Are Las Vegas home prices still declining? Reports differ

Sun file

The Las Vegas skyline, including hotels and casinos from the world-famous Strip, looms in the background of row upon row of houses.

New data issued Tuesday sent mixed signals about the Las Vegas-area residential real estate market.

Debt rating agency Standard & Poor's issued its monthly S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, which cover data through January.

S&P said Las Vegas-area prices in January fell to June 1996 levels, a post-recession low, as they slipped 0.5 percent from December and were down 9 percent from January 2011.

These changes compare to a decline of 0.8 percent from December to January and a year-to-year drop of 3.8 percent for 20 big U.S. markets tracked by Standard & Poor's.

More recent data, however, from the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors shows prices locally in February improved on a month-to-month basis.

The Realtors said this month that the median price of single-family homes sold locally in February was $121,000, up 2.5 percent from $118,000 in January; but down 5.5 percent from $128,000 in February 2011.

Separately, data collector CoreLogic reported Tuesday that the mortgage delinquency rate in the Las Vegas area decreased in January, a sign that potentially there will be fewer loan defaults and foreclosures in coming months.

CoreLogic data for January show 14.71 percent of mortgage loans locally were 90 days or more delinquent compared to 18.93 percent for the same period last year.

Despite the improvement, the Las Vegas rate in January was more than double the U.S. rate of 7.24 percent, CoreLogic said.

CoreLogic also reported that the rate of Las Vegas-area foreclosures among outstanding mortgage loans was 5.75 percent in January, a decrease of 3.55 percentage points compared to January 2011, when the rate was 9.3 percent. This decline could be linked to a trend seen in 2011 of banks proceeding with fewer foreclosures while they figured out how to comply with a new Nevada law boosting foreclosure documentation standards.

Foreclosure activity in the Las Vegas area in January remained higher than the national foreclosure rate of 3.43 percent, CoreLogic said.

With unemployment in Las Vegas still elevated at 13.1 percent, analysts say it's unknown when local residential real estate prices will show steady, sustained gains.

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