Friday, May 6, 2022 | 5 a.m.
In just 10 years, the median price for a home in Las Vegas has quadrupled.
According to a report released Friday from the Las Vegas Realtors trade group, the median price for an existing home in Southern Nevada was $475,000 in April.
That’s up from the previous record of $460,000 set in March, up 27% from April 2021, and more than four times that of the median price of $118,000 during the worst of the Great Recession in early 2012.
As an added complication for the strained housing market, mortgage rates are also on the upswing.
The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday a half-percentage point increase in its benchmark interest rate. The interest rate for a 30-year mortgage, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, inched up to 5.27% for the week ending Thursday.
That represents the highest mortgage rate recorded since 2009.
“Although local home prices are still increasing, we expect the rate of appreciation to start slowing down at some point as these trends continue,” said Brandon Roberts, a longtime local Realtor and president of the trade group. “At least we had more homes available for sale than we had the previous month and previous year.”
Las Vegas Realtors reported nearly 3,800 homes, condominiums and townhomes sold in April. Detached home sales were down 15% for the month while sales of condos and townhomes were down 24% for the period.
At the end of last month, the Realtor group reported that just over 2,400 homes were on the market without any type of offer. That’s up 34% from April 2021.
Only about 500 condominiums and townhomes were listed for sale without any offer at the end of April, however, which represented a 2% dip from the same month last year.
The median price for a local condo or townhome was $275,000 in April, a record. That figure represented a 35% increase from April 2021, according to the report.
The Las Vegas housing market, Roberts said, has less than a one-month supply of properties for sale. The market has rarely, if ever, been as tight as it has been in recent months, he said.
In April, 32% of all local property sales closed as cash purchases, which likely signals a healthy amount of investor activity in the market.
In April 2021, about 29% of all transactions were cash sales. The high-water mark for cash home sales in Las Vegas came in March 2013 when 60% of all sales were recorded as cash transactions.
The Las Vegas Realtors group, which has gone by different monikers over the years, was founded in 1947. It has over 17,000 local members.
