COMMON GOAL FOR BOTH BUYERS AND SELLERS IN LAS VEGAS
Right now, just a few days into spring, we are right at the start of our Las Vegas’s peak real estate selling season. I’ve always found it odd that you don’t hear much about it—but that also makes it the beginning of the buyingseason, too! As a licensed Las Vegas REALTOR®, throughout the course of the year I am privileged to act as the agent for both buyers and sellers in many different transactions. The details I’m called upon to manage do vary somewhat depending on which side I am representing in any given sale—but there is one very significant goal that I regard as identical, no matter in which capacity I serve (more on that later). There are some generalizations that usually hold true about the difference in mindset between prospective buyers and sellers. For one thing, sellers automatically have in-depth knowledge about their Las Vegas property. Gained through the years, they know the community; they know the most reliable Las Vegas tradespeople; they know the ins and outs of getting around Las Vegas. Sellers have a degree of confidence that comes with experience: and when it come to the property at issue, they’re old hands! Buyers, on the other hand, find themselves to some extent venturing into the unknown. Even if they are already Las Vegas residents, the prospective neighborhood may be largely terra incognita. And for sure, they can’t be positive about the details of the property—what are its strong points, and (worrisome, this) its unknown vulnerabilities, if there are any. In short, buyers automatically come armed with less confidence. Bringing more parity to the two sides is one of the key services that will lead to the result both want. Whether my own client happens to be on the seller side or buyer side, when the buyers gain confidence that they are as close as possible to the sellers’ encyclopedic knowledge of the property, the best result has the best chance of being met. As a practical matter, that means digging in and working diligently to assemble and relate all possible information that can be gathered. It can also mean sometimes finding out where the buyers feel least confident, and laboring as needed to see that the gap is filled. Before, I noted that there is one significant way in which my goal as representative for the Las Vegas’s buyers and sellers is always the same. It’s this: the best result is always achieved when both sides come away fully satisfied that their interests have been well served. For the seller, importantly, that means that they’ve received fair compensation for their home. For the buyer, likewise—with the added element of emerging with the gut feeling that no matter what the future holds, they know that they have been leveled with. When buyers and sellers each have confidence that the sale has resulted in fair dealing, the positive feeling lasts. Whether your next Las Vegas real estate venture is buying or selling, I hope you’ll give my office a call!
LAS VEGAS HOME SALES PROSPECTS MORE THAN A GLASS HALF FULL
Even the least vigilant of the Las Vegas’s market-watchers had their antennae out last week, the traditional time of the month when real estate statistics are released from the most authoritative sources. National trends in home sales frequently provide clues to the direction the Las Vegas market is likely to take—and with the spring selling season already under way, this is the time of year when movements can be more volatile than usual. Last week’s data was less exciting than has been the case in recent years—and what movement there was seemed to leave opinion-makers perplexed. The Associated Press writers put it this way: “The housing market enters the traditional spring buying season facing a quandary.” When you are interested in clues to how home sales are likely to fare, words like “quandary” don’t help. It was, in fact, glass-half-full/glass-half-empty kind of news. You could see what you wanted to see. If you were a pessimistic type, your predisposition might have been bolstered by The New York Times Headline, “Existing Home Sales Drop More Than Expected.” There it was! Confirmation of a downturn in activity. Though you could have admitted that the trend might not extend to every corner of the country, the possibility that Las Vegashome sales might now head south couldn’t be denied. The New York Times said so! On the other hand, if you were among our Las Vegas’s more numerous optimistic observers, reading the same news left you thinking that the very same headline was actually slightly misleading. It was based on the National Association of REALTORS® report that talked about home sales prices continuing to rise. The “home sales drop” was only (as the headline actually read) against what had been “expected.” Sales levels had been sizzling for months, so expectations had been high (not among the pessimists, certainly). But the numbers showed that existing home sales were actually 2.2% higher than a year earlier! Reading the entire NAR report could explain why The New York Times emerged with a quandary. In it, readers learned that U.S. job growth “continues to hum along at a robust pace” which could explain why “overall demand for buying is still solid entering the busy spring season.” But then they learned that “anxiety about the health of the economy is holding back a segment of would-be buyers.” On one hand, there was the 48th consecutive month of “steadfast price growth;” on the other, “unshakably low supply levels.” The share of first-time home buyers fell 30%, yet the share of first time home buyers “is up 29% from a year ago.” The Times’ quandary was certainly understandable. But although not much light may have been shed on the prognosis for home sales in Las Vegas, a couple of factors could have been deduced. In the coming months, home sales certainly won’t “be affected by the large East Coast blizzard” that had impacted February numbers. What is likely to affect sales is the continuation of tantalizingly low 30-year, conventional fixed-rate mortgage rates, “the lowest since April 2015.” If that kind of encouragement has you interested in checking out the current crop of great Las Vegas home offerings, I hope you’ll forego the quandary altogether—just give me a call!
LAS VEGAS LUXURY REAL ESTATE ESCAPES APRIL FOOLS DAY WORRIES
It looked like another chuckle-worthy April Fool’s Day dispatch: CNBC’s webcast “Is NYC luxury real estate about to go bust?” It was barely 7 in the morning on April 1—but only the most bleary-eyed Las Vegas web watchers were likely to have been caught off-guard. Pranksters had already made mincemeat of the credibility Friday news dispatches normally deserve. Web parodists had started early (against all common decency, the day before). Late on Thursday, Gizmodo had announced the sale of the “Moon Watch”—its $27,500 price tag justified by a housing made of genuine moon rock brought back to earth by the Soviet’s 1974 Luna probe. Sure. Even before the sun came up, Google Express made its first sky-enabled delivery. Not by drone: the first delivery was an axe, dropped by parachute. Duologue advertised a miraculous new product—a pillow that uses Morse code to teach you a language while you sleep (“I went to bed speaking only English, but woke up bilingual. Buenos Dias todos!”). So CNBC’s projection of doomsday for Manhattan luxury real estate—for April-Fools-wary Las Vegas readers, at least—would not have been taken very seriously. The problem was, it actually was authentic. Sort of. The webcast was a segment lifted from the CNBC Squawkbox show, presumably aired that morning. The blurb promised, “CNBC’s Robert Frank takes the wraps off a new report that shows the luxury real estate market in NYC is about to crumble.” And it did have a promising setup for what (to anyone living outside The City, possibly including a few Las Vegas residents) might take to be breathtakingly unsustainable price levels. Some of the new records posted: • Average apartment sales prices top $2 million (for the first time) • Price Per Sq/Foot = $1,713 • Number of sales = 2,877 (a jump of 8%) But…so where is the promised luxury real estate “bust”? It didn’t seem readily at hand—especially after we were shown a 5-bedroom Central Park coop. It had been bought in 2003 for a pittance ($12 million). Now it had sold quickly. By regular Las Vegas standards, at least, that didn’t seem to evidence much luxury real estate crumbling, since the selling price had been $35 million. Frank explained that the owners had done “some renovating”—so we were momentarily left wondering if the crumbling was because they’d had to go to so much trouble… No! The reason put forth was that many of the record sales resulted from contracts signed as much as 18 months earlier. So maybe it was possible that these high prices and sales volumes might not be sustainable. There was no evidence beyond nervousness about China and the stock market tumble (which had just reversed, oddly enough). That the report on NYC luxury real estate was not an April Fool’s joke was a sort of April Fool’s joke in itself. Here in Las Vegas, those kinds of worries were less widespread. China seemed a bit remote—and the stock market had already come roaring back—but neither seemed to be key to Las Vegas’s luxury real estate. If you would like some authentically real-world market info, do give me a call!
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