Home builder sales in Las Vegas continued to decline last month as apartment hunters continued to pay record prices for new homes.
Home developers reported 935 net sales – newly signed sales contracts less cancellations – in southern Nevada in June, the third straight month-on-month decline and the lowest number for the year, according to a new report from Home Builders of Las Vegas Research.
Home builders’ asking prices continue to rise across southern Nevada, albeit at a slower pace and less frequently recently for some developers, Company President Andrew Smith reported.
Overall, however, the average closing prices for new homes have increased every month this year, hitting a record high of $ 411,418 in June, up 8.6 percent year over year.
After a buyer signs a contract of sale with a developer, it can take several months for the home to be completed and for the purchase to be completed.
Many people continue to wonder if the recent slowdown in home builders’ sales activity locally and nationally is a “worrying trend” or simply a return to earth, Smith wrote in the report.
“We tend to do the latter,” he adds.
Driven by low borrowing costs and more overseas buyers than usual, the Las Vegas housing market has seen record prices and rapid sales for months. On the resale side, home seekers have inundated properties with offers and routinely paid above asking price, while home builders have regularly raised prices, placed buyers on waiting lists and accepted bids for lots.
At the local level, home-owned home sales declined for two months during the normally busy spring buying season before recovering in June.
However, as seen in Smith’s report, home builders’ sales continued to decline last month as prices continued to escalate as buyer traffic to new subdivisions “steadily declined” in the second quarter.
At the national level, the pace of sales among builders for single-family homes fell 6.6 percent last month from May and 19.4 percent from June last year, federal officials reported on Monday.
Last month, US home builders sold homes for the lowest price in more than a year, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Robert Dietz, the association’s chief economist, said in a press release that “sales have declined as construction costs have risen,” adding that builders have tried to cope with delivery delays and “cost challenges” and in many regions with vacant lots and jobs.
On site, some builders have decided to hold back land for sale in order to better meet delivery targets and “avoid being hit too hard by rising material prices, which are inevitable between the time the purchase contract is signed and the actual start of the home seem to be”. be built, ”wrote Smith.
Still, home builders reported 7,348 net sales in southern Nevada in the first half of the year, up 46 percent over the same period in 2020, according to Smith, a period last year that included a decline in home sales after the pandemic sparked widespread business closings and other chaos.
Builders also closed 5,825 home sales this year by June, 22 percent more than in the same period last year, and withdrew 7,792 new building permits by mid-2021, 61 percent more than last year, indicating a sharp increase in building plans.
Overall, the market remains hot, “though perhaps not as hot as it has been in the past nine months,” wrote Smith.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
