Las Vegas Home Sales Turn Down in May

Looks like the bachelor party is over and the hangover has begun.

DQ News reports May Las Vegas Metro Area Home Sales

Las Vegas region home sales in May dropped below the year-ago level for the first time in 21 months as fewer foreclosed properties sold and the impact of the federal tax credit began to fade. The median price paid for a home in May barely budged compared with April and it fell slightly from a year earlier, a real estate information service reported.

Foreclosure resales – homes that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months – fell to 49.5 percent of all resales in May, down from 51.9 percent in April and down from a record-high 73.7 percent in April 2009, according to MDA DataQuick of San Diego. The firm tracks real estate trends nationally via public property records.

Foreclosure resales have declined each month since last year’s peak. Last month’s figure was the lowest since foreclosure resales were 48.1 percent of the resale market in March 2008.

A total of 4,386 new and resale houses and condos closed escrow in the Las Vegas-Paradise metro area (Clark County) last month, down 1.7 percent from April and down 3.3 percent from a year earlier. On average, sales have increased 5.0 percent between April and May since 1994, when DataQuick’s complete Las Vegas region statistics begin.

May’s sales total was the second-lowest for that month – behind May 2008 – in a decade, and it was 9.7 percent lower than the average May sales tally back to 1994.

Last month’s sales of homes priced below $200,000 increased slightly to 77.2 percent of all transactions, up from 76.5 percent in April and up from 74.9 percent in May 2009. Sales above $500,000 also rose a tad last month to 2.5 percent of all transactions, up from 1.9 percent in April and 1.7 percent in May 2009.

The number of houses and condos that resold (meaning no newly built homes) in May fell to 3,859, down 3.1 percent from April and down 7.5 percent from a year earlier. Until April, resales had risen on a year-over-year basis for 23 straight months.

Sales of all newly built houses and condos totaled 527 in May, up 9.8 percent from April and up 44.4 percent from a year earlier. However, it was still the second-slowest May, behind last year, for new-home sales since at least 1994.

The median price paid for all new and resale houses and condos sold in the Las Vegas metro area in May was $134,000, virtually unchanged from $133,955 in April and down 0.7 percent from $135,000 a year earlier. In April, the median had risen above the year-ago level by 0.7 percent, marking the first annual gain since February 2007.

Last month’s median was 57.1 percent below the peak $312,000 median in November 2006.