There was some excitement in the Southwest part of the valley early this morning. We heard helicopters circling overhead and my initial (sleepy, groggy) thought was that we were back in Los Angeles and that the Ghettto Bird was paying us a visit.
Turns out that some homes under construction in Mountain’s Edge were on fire. Nearby, occupied homes were scorched but none were damaged.
Is it suspicious that these houses caught on fire? Yes. One has to assume that somebody didn’t want the construction to continue. Another crazy sign of the times.
A story, Life does go on after foreclosure aired on Marketplace today on NPR. Here’s a map of the Broxburn Street mentioned.
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Is it a good thing that we are not mentioned in this article about falling home prices?
It is interesting to note that many of the cities we were considering (San Francisco, San Diego, Phoenix) are listed as having greater than 50% drops in median sales prices. We would have lost even more equity if we had relocated there instead of to Las Vegas!
The last thing the Vegas Valley needs is another master planned community. It’s good news then that the Park Highlands project in North Las Vegas has filed for bankruptcy protection.
That’s 16,000 fewer homes for the overburdened real estate market to deal with.
The Las Vegas Sun is full of bleak headlines:
Casino win on Strip down 12.2 percent in March
Fifteen-month slump continues
Las Vegas home sales soar
Driven by a whopping 40 percent reduction in prices, home sales soared in April in the Las Vegas area, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported today.
Seven is not such a lucky number in this context:
Las Vegas had the highest rate of foreclosures of any city, with one in every 22 homes subject to a foreclosure filing in the first three months of the year. The rate of foreclosure filings was 4.5%, seven times the national average.
Read the rest of the bad news on Yahoo.
It’s official: Las Vegas is the worst real estate market in the country.
Wishing you’d left the game earlier is a time-honored Las Vegas tradition. Today, that’s true not only for gamblers but for homeowners there. The last time Las Vegas properties were worth more than the average mortgage? August 2003.
Blame overbuilding and risky loans, a gambling mentality or even the desert sun, but based on Thursday’s results from the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, which measures metro home prices in 20 cities through December 2008, Las Vegas is the weakest market in the country.
My friend Bill forwarded me this NPR segment about Las Vegas foreclosures, the madness leading up to the real estate bubble bursting and accounts of real people struggling to pay their mortgages or renegotiating terms with lenders.
We are the foreclosure capital of the county with 1 in 60 homes in foreclosure.
If my neighborhood is any kind of indication about the state of the Las Vegas real estate market then prices may have hit bottom. At least for inventory already on the market.
For the last year and a half I have enjoyed having zero occupants on either side of me with both bank-owned houses sitting empty. Real estate agents stopped coming by the properties and I have been tending to the neglected landscaping to preserve the image of our area.
But as of this week, both homes, along with another a few houses down the block have sold. The new owners have been nice enough so far and they seem really happy with the deals they got (about 40% less than what I paid in May 2007). As much as it hurts to see my equity disappear I am glad that these homes finally sold and that actual owners will be living in them. This has to be a good sign for the local market. Have prices hit bottom? Clearly these buyers thought so.
If Chris Binkley’s book is about the old guard and how they shaped Las Vegas, this article from the NY Times is about how a new generation of moguls is building out their vision of Las Vegas.
