You don’t have to search long for signs of the heated Las Vegas housing market.
Just this week, a home in the Spring Valley area sold for $ 22,000 above asking price, a house in Summerlin for $ 75,000 above list price, and a house in Henderson for nearly $ 160,000 more than some Years. Show listing records.
Overall, house prices in the Las Vegas area hit new all-time highs every month – but in some ways they are still below the bubble high 15 years ago.
The average retail price of previously owned single-family homes – most of the market – hit a record $ 405,000 in July, a staggering 22.7 percent year-over-year increase, Vegas Realtors reports.
Prior to last year, the average house price in Las Vegas peaked at $ 315,000 in mid-2006 – which equates to $ 423,834 in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation.
The over $ 18,800 gap between then and now underscores how inflated the Las Vegas housing bubble was and that despite the frenzy we saw last year, there are still some key differences between today’s hot streak and the who ended up giving in a financial disaster.
The current frenzy in Las Vegas will end at some point, but how or when is to be guessed. Right now, prices continue to rise, largely thanks to cheap borrowing costs that allow buyers to break their budget, and homes are selling fast.
During the frenzied mid-2000s, the easy money market skyrocketed. Virtually anyone could take out a mortgage as lenders often opened the vaults without checking the borrower’s income.
Las Vegas builders were building far more homes than they are now, builders imagined forests of condominiums down in the valley, and flipping homes was an easy moneymaker.
When the bubble burst, Las Vegas was ground zero for America’s real estate wreck. People across the valley lost their homes to foreclosures or saw their property values sink deeply under water, and the region was littered with abandoned, partially built projects.
Today analysts have noticed the differences in the real estate booms and therefore believe the current one is not meant for the faceplant the other suffered.
We’ll find out at some point whether they’re right. However, if you look at past property prices in Las Vegas, today’s values don’t always lag behind.
In September 1930, an advertisement in the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal offered “160 acres near the city front on the Los Angeles Highway” for $ 75 an acre.
Adjusted for inflation, the asking price in a tiny desert outpost is now only USD 1,233 per acre.
The LA Highway is now known, of course, as the Strip, where land values in the casino-filled corridor have reached tens of millions of dollars per acre.
“Has opportunities for big profit,” it says in the ad.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
