LAS VEGAS REAL ESTATE LISTINGS ARE THE BACKBONE OF AN INDUSTRY
The first stop for anyone looking for a new home in Las Vegas—or for anyone who is even mildly curious about what properties are currently available—is the Las Vegas real estate listings. Like those you find here on my site, today’s online real estate listings are updated regularly all across the internet. It’s a coordinated system that appears deceptively simple on the surface, bringing you what you ask for from within the mind-bogglingly vast amount of detail that encompasses all the properties being offered throughout the country at that moment. When a prospective buyer goes online to get a feel for the Las Vegas properties being offered, the real estate listings she or he sees appear to be straightforward enough. The information is clearly formatted, presented in a way that makes it easy to compare with other properties’ attributes. That apparent simplicity might be a little bit misleading, as anyone who has recently put their own home on the market knows. Before any listing goes online, all the property’s physical details have to be determined and verified. It’s your agent’s job to make sure the paperwork is complete—including the legal documentation that says, yes, this property is for sale at this amount. The 2015 NAR® handbook on multiple listing policies fills 152 pages for a good reason. ‘Under the hood’ of the neighborhood listings is the structure of legal agreements that stitch together the cooperative framework that enables the smooth functioning of the modern real estate industry. Stripped of all its legal bells and whistles, it’s really an agreement among brokers and agents who agree to the way work will be apportioned and commissions shared. As you might expect, those 152 pages also cover some special kinds of real estate listings. Homeowners, for instance, can create Las Vegas real estate listings that are not made public. This is done when the seller withholds consent for a listing to be published with the MLS compilation. Although that might seem to be a particularly bad idea—like a candidate running for office who decides it would be a good idea to keep his name off the ballot—there are circumstances when it makes sense. Such ‘office exclusive’ listings can serve a useful purpose when maximum confidentiality is important. Celebrities and other public figures sometimes use this approach, as do sellers who’d rather not publicize their plan to jump ship until it’s a fait accompli. All this is made as simple and straightforward as possible for the benefit of all. If it were too complex, sellers and buyers would hesitate to get involved. The market would suffer. In fact, today’s Las Vegas listings—especially as they are presented online, on sites like this one— represent a standout example of how technology can make even complicated commercial undertakings easier and more efficient than they have ever been. To find your next home, for instance, you need only check out the current Las Vegas listings, and then there’s only one other thing you have to do: call me up!
FRIDAY NEWS TRIGGERS LAS VEGAS MORTGAGE RATE WAKEUP CALL
There’s a reason that Las Vegas home loan providers sometimes choose to lead their ads with a ‘lock’ provision. They know that potential clients likely to be enticed by low Las Vegas mortgage rate numbers are fairly sophisticated—they know that today’s mortgage rate is not necessarily tomorrow’s. By the time a home loan is finalized, the headlined number could be less favorable; hence, the ‘lock’ guarantees. For quite a while—years, actually—Las Vegas mortgage rates have behaved themselves pretty much the way we’d like. There may have been occasional minor upticks, but seldom any that would cause serious consternation. The interest rate hikes which some experts had predicted for 2014 and 2015 never seemed to materialize: every notch up was followed by notches back down. Mortgage rate volatility disappeared as a topic of interest from real estate and financial pages. What discussion there was tended to be predictable: rates would certainly have to rise, sooner or later—but later was (yawn) a lot more likely. It was pretty much All Quiet on the Mortgage Front…zzzzzzzzzz… Until last week, which provided a definite wakeup call. It was a textbook example of how mercurial mortgage rates can turn—and how right those were who have been championing financing and/or refinancing while rates are in the historically low range. The week started out quietly enough. In the previous week, before the Federal Reserve’s 2-day meeting, consumer mortgage rates were, per themortgagereport website, “scraping new lows, bestowing refinance opportunities on homeowners and boosting the purchasing power for buyers” across the nation. As usual, the Fed get-together provided hints that the Fed Funds rate would certainly have to rise, sooner or later…and although sooner did seem to be jostling later for consideration. It had been a possibility for so long, the usual carefully-worded announcement failed to raise undue concern. Yawns had to be stifled. Until Friday, when the Non-Farm Payroll report hit the snoozing nation like a tornado in January. It crushed the forecasts. It was stellar. This was as unexpected as, per FuturesMag writer Matt Weller, it was “essentially perfect.” The world’s largest economy had created a “stunning” 271,000 jobs. What was not to like? For those who were banking on mortgage interest rates remaining frozen in the cellar, there was a lot not to like. The strong news made the Fed much more likely to finally raise the Fed Funds rate next month! Web headlines were screaming within minutes: “Bad Day for Mortgage Rates; Non-Farm Payrolls Soar” and “Non-farm payroll paves the way for a Fed rate hike in December.” The Washington Post even came up with “This settles it: The Fed is going to raise interest rates in December.” That may be far from certain but quoted home loan rates did begin to rise in anticipation. By the close of business on Friday, the Mortgage News Daily observed rates that were the highest since July. What does this mean for Las Vegas mortgage interest rates? If the now wide-awake experts are credible, it looks as if taking advantage of still-low rates is likely to prove advantageous. There are never any guarantees, but for anyone intending a move that involves a home loan, it might not be a bad idea to give me a call—sooner rather than later!
LAS VEGAS HOME SEARCH CRITERIA DESIGNED TO DETER BUDGET
Once a Las Vegas home search gets underway, even prospective buyers who hadn’t hardened up the prices they were aiming for begin to hone in on a target range. Even a cursory excursion into the Las Vegas listings forces the issue. Anyone who is at all serious about finding a new home sees the correlation between the listed asking prices and ‘how much house’ is available in that range. In most cases, lower prices denote features that are, for one reason or another, not very popular. Higher prices can mean the opposite: top-of-the-line quality… (or an overly optimistic seller). So once a home search has narrowed the field to the Las Vegas offerings that meet at least the minimum physical requirements, the lower number of the price range is established. If a realistic family budget shows more to spare, more expensive possibilities can be explored. But first, it’s also a good idea to make at least one revision to those budgetary assumptions, because there’s one Las Vegas where the actual costs of home ownership can cause a surprise. The particular line item we’re thinking about is the one that, according to the experts, is ‘devilishly hard to predict.’ The maintenance cost. Devilishly hard or not, the best ballpark figure that can be agreed upon is 1% of a home’s value, every year. When you are contemplating a pristine Las Vegas property, that may seem to be a wildly pessimistic figure, but it is simply the case that every home requires maintenance. Appliances fail, paint blisters or fades, shingles fly off or break down; things (as the book title says) fall apart. The 1% figure is accepted by most lenders—and they should know. Any Las Vegas home search sooner or later narrows the field to prospective properties within a lower and upper price range. That upper number should be flexible. Assuming a home has an investment that will grow in value over time (TheStreet’s Jeff Brown pegs it at 4% per annum), “because of inflation, your maintenance costs will also continue going up, so they will always remain equal to 1% of the home’s value.” In the post quoted, Brown’s intent is to promote the investment returns on a Wall Street portfolio. It’s only fair to point out that even Wall Street denizens seem to rest easier when they own their own house (houses, in fact). The point here is that as a home search expands to higher-priced offerings, it’s a good idea to be willing to recalculate that 1% figure. Although the natural tendency is to start out by penciling in a dollar amount to cover maintenance—and thereafter to mentally stick to it—the prudent procedure is to revise that line item to reflect the actual value of the home you settle on. It might mean your Las Vegas home search excludes some homes you really like, but the result will be a family budget that’s less likely to be met with unpleasant surprises later on. I work to help my clients’ home searches turn up exciting properties that fit all their requirements—and within budgets that fit their long-term requirements. This fall sellers are offering a number of great values across the price spectrum, so I hope you’ll decide to give me a call!
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