Las Vegas home prices rise strongest in US, report says
Las Vegas home prices grew at the fastest pace nationally for a full year, a new report shows, but the market locally and nationally has let off the gas.
Southern Nevada prices were up 6.4 percent year-over-year in May, compared to 3.4 percent nationally, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index released Tuesday by S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Las Vegas’ price growth was highest among the 20 markets in the report for the 12th consecutive month, though the rate of acceleration has slowed considerably since last summer.
In August 2018, Southern Nevada prices were up nearly 14 percent from a year earlier, S&P Dow Jones previously reported.
It’s not the only sign of Las Vegas’ housing slowdown. Amid higher prices, buyers are picking up fewer homes, and the once-depleted tally of listings without offers has shot back up.
Price growth has slowed around the country as well. In June of 2018, for instance, U.S. home prices were up 6.2 percent from a year earlier.
“Thwarted by climbing prices for years, buyers are no longer willing to pay any price,” Matthew Speakman, an economist with home-listing site Zillow, said in a statement Tuesday. “There were too few homes on the market and buyers were unable to find houses that fit both their needs and their budgets, so they took a breather.”
The sluggish U.S. price growth stems largely from the most expensive markets, where years of price growth have undermined affordability. Home prices rose less than 2 percent in Los Angeles, New York, San Diego and San Francisco. Prices in the typically hot market of Seattle fell 1.2 percent from a year ago, a sharp reversal from an annualized gain of 13.6 percent in May 2018.
In Las Vegas, the slowdown has affected resales and new construction. In the homebuilding market, buyers are pulling back from developers’ best-selling product in Southern Nevada – the single-family house — and gravitating toward less-expensive condos and townhomes.
Builders closed 4,245 sales of single-family homes this year through June, down 7.4 percent from the same six-month stretch in 2018, and 684 sales of attached homes, up 17.1 percent, according to Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter. The Associated Press contributed to this report.