I found it rather interesting to pull these Las Vegas residential resale home sale statistics & trends from 2002-2010. Obviously we are sub year 2002 pricing – which is the earliest I could go! I have actually seen some areas (mostly in the east part of the valley) that were sub 1985 prices!
Notice how the increased demand for housing (through very relaxed mortgage underwriting standards) pushed the prices up in 2004 & 2005. Notice how the lack of demand pushed prices down and subsequent increases of default took those “we can finance a ham sandwich” mortgages away creating sharp declines. Even with high amounts of units purchased the last several years shows that we continue to defy basic economic laws of supply and demand through continued depreciation.
I have been working an “I could tell you but then I would have to kill you” job doing fraud reports for an investor since the beginning of the year. Something I have noticed in that time frame – doing that special job – is that we haven’t even pushed through 3/4 of the underwater inventory. Oddly enough before I started doing this I thought we had already worked through 3/4 of the inventory and gave it another 2-5 years of living in the depths of ground zero foreclosure hell. One of my favorite marketing chicks for a title company sent me a report this week that confirmed that number – 70 some odd percent of homes are still underwater in the valley.
Knowing what I know today, living & working the foreclosure nightmare, I have to adjust that number upwards from 2-5 years to 8-10 years of working through all of this mess. Unless they start financing ham sandwiches again – which I doubt!
I will do these again in January after we close out 2011. So far YTD (Nov 18, 2011) we have 41,706 units closed with a median price of $109,900.
there are aprox 100 thousand more homes to get rid of..we r selling 45k a year..give it 3 years to clear..then we need to wade thru a few investors that got prices that no one else could find to make their profit..that should take 2 more years..then baby boomers will go nuts in the l.v market because they cant put off retirement purchase any longer ..in 5 years we will start a new mini bubble