FEATURES DESIGNED TO INSPIRE LAS VEGAS LUXURY HOME BUYERS
When it comes to selling Las Vegas luxury homes, you really can’t pigeonhole who the ‘typical’ buyer is likely to be. The 9% of buyers that make up the pool of ‘affluent’ prospects are themselves pretty much profile-proof—and the dollar value that 9% represents fluctuates substantially from one end of the country to the other. On the other hand, it is possible to take advantage of features that are growing in popularity with today’s luxury home buyers. Realtytimes researchers found that affluent buyers are increasingly attracted to features that belong in the smart-home technology category. Smart thermostats that owners control right from their smartphones, wireless homes security camera arrays, and fully tricked-out home theaters are drawn. To qualify at the high end, an entertainment center really should be controlled by a single device. Let’s face it: no matter how fancy a home theater might be if three or four remote controls are visible, they’re certain to draw scowls! Kitchen tech—of the kind that marries function with fashion—continues to gain in popularity. Bringing professional-level tools into domestic kitchens is a goal being incorporated in more and more top kitchen appliance offerings. On the leading edge: ovens with high-performance steam generators as well as blast chillers with touch-sensitive, intuitive user interfaces. All are designed “to create the kitchen that’s right”—one to match a buyer’s “level of culinary daring.” Digital Interiors found that 94% of such buyers “would sacrifice 1,00 square feet of living space for more technology…”—but keep in mind that most researchers find that, with few exceptions, 3,500 square feet is the non-urban baseline for qualifying in this market. Selling luxury homes used to begin with location, location, location. But that may be undergoing a subtle shift. In Luxury defined, one leading point is made that traditionally prominent ZIP codes are “no longer the defining baseline” for luxury homes. Newly included are Las Vegas where there is a “slower perceived tempo of life”—which fits in with the emerging interest in homes with ‘experiential’ features (like meditation gardens or outdoor showers). Few of our Las Vegas’s luxury homes have those particular features, but being turnkey-ready is another matter. Brand new homes qualify automatically, but as has always been the case, existing residences that compete with other high-end homes in Las Vegas can be expected to do best when they qualify as one of the ‘just bring your toothbrush’ properties. Affluent prospects may be well-heeled, but they are also increasingly attentive to energy-efficient features. Some new homes designed with the luxury market in the crosshairs boast of ‘super-efficient’ floorplans built to consume 50% less energy than typical new homes. The draw is not entirely economical, either. That’s evidenced in how the current dip in energy costs hasn’t resulted in a proportional tapering in demand for homes reflecting conscious living (features reflecting environmental awareness and sustainability). Luxury home owners, like their prospective buyers, have a pretty clear idea of what they demand when it comes to selling their properties. First and foremost: an agent with comprehensive knowledge of the Las Vegas market—and experience with luxury homes. According to Money magazine, sales at the high end are growing faster than in any other market segment…which is another way of pointing out that if you are looking to get into our Las Vegasluxury home market, now is a pretty good time to give me a call!
MORTGAGE INTEREST RATES IN LAS VEGAS ARE JUST ONE OF MANY
It’s really as simple as this: when Las Vegas mortgage interest rates are low, good things happen in Las Vegasreal estate. And last week, when The Washington Post commented on the news coming out of Washington, it indicated exactly that. “Mortgage rates fall for the third week in a row” was the headline summarizing the latest data from Freddie Mac. It was good news—but there were also new grounds to wonder how long it was going to last. One of the key reasons for the strength of the Las Vegas’s residential market has been shown in the ‘affordability’ index, which gives a numerical answer to the question every prospective Las Vegas home buyer understands: can I afford it? The index uses a number of economic factors to come up with the answer to whether typical families can afford the monthly cost of a typical home. Of course, it all revolves around what that monthly cost actually is. For Las Vegas buyers, that cost rises and falls along with Las Vegas interest rates. So the latest figures once again signaled smooth sailing. Nationally, Freddie Mac reported that the 30-year fixed-rate average had ‘slipped’ to 3.93%. Anything less than 4% is, in historical terms, really low. As homeowners who were around at the start of the 1980s will tell you, when mortgage interest rates climb into double digits, the monthly payment amounts grow so steep the whole market is hamstrung (in 1981 and 1982, mortgage interest rates averaged north of 16%!) That’s the reason why anyone who is even beginning to lay plans to buy or sell knows their budget will be affected by the direction Las Vegas interest rates head. Consulting expert opinion hasn’t helped much over past few years, either. Most seers have been predicting a rise in rates for quite a while. They’ve been consistent (in being wrong). Nevertheless, at the end of last week it looked increasingly likely that their expectations might finally be met—and soon. Federal Reserve’s Chairman Yellin has been issuing statements that indicate a bias toward raising Fed rates if the economy can sustain them. On Friday, the latest labor reports were widely hailed as indicating the kind of strength that she had been talking about. The year’s final Fed meeting will take place on December 15-16. If they do raise the benchmark federal funds rate, Las Vegas mortgage interest rates will certainly follow. The real question on both fronts was how much… When you decide to buy or sell a home, Las Vegas mortgage factors are important, yes—but they are only some of many considerations. One factor that won’t change is that I will be standing by, ready to help on all fronts!
IN SEARCH OF THE MOST ACCURATE LAS VEGAS LISTINGS
Have you ever wondered about the way Las Vegas listings appear on your screen when you search for houses for sale through one of the search engines? If you have already found a Las Vegas REALTOR’s® website (like this one!), it’s easy to search the Las Vegas listings right from that site without bothering further. You’ll come up with the most current accurate information because it represents directly updated information from our Las Vegas’s multiple listing services. But whenever you go searching for Las Vegas listings through Google, Bing, or any of the other search engines (there are scads of them), you will see that what comes up will be quite different. You may find individual house listings, alternating with real estate agency home pages, mixed in with aggregators like Zillow and real estate magazine ads. Depending upon which search engine and the way you phrase your inquiry, you might actually come up with an interesting listing…or one that’s peculiarly inappropriate—like a listing from another Las Vegas or state—or one that’s been out of date for months. There are reasons for such disorder. They have to do with a historical scramble that has been going on ever since computers and the web started making house-hunting something you could do from your own living room. The logical first stage came about rapidly, as Las Vegas realtors everywhere started putting their listings on their websites, then working out the technical details to allow the whole Las Vegas’s MLS listings to appear. Then came the original aggregators: Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com—the deep-pocketed media companies that worked out ways to combine web data from all over to make listings into one gigantic national database. Except for house-hunters who weren’t set on moving to a particular Las Vegas, the advantage to nationalizing the listings did not really go to the consumer—it went to the aggregators (also called ‘syndicators’). Since they could offer their information to a nation-sized audience, they could afford nation-sized advertising budgets to attract more views. Since they got more views, the search engines automatically found them to be ‘more popular’ than mere Las Vegas agency sites, so their listings moved to the top of the search engine results pages. It was a self-perpetuating cycle, especially once the aggregators started selling ‘spaces’ for Las Vegas listings back to my colleagues, who were watching their own sites lose out in the race to attract web searchers. The aggregators were actually charging real estate agents to place their own listings on the aggregators’ pages! Realtors did not see the humor in this—and there are some ongoing legal challenges to illustrate their lack of appreciation. The reason that this makes a difference to you, the, is that the original purpose of the big aggregators was to make searching easier for you, the Las Vegas homeowner or listing searcher. One problem is that keeping listing data current and error-free has always been a problem for anyone with a nation-wide database to administer. Another is that data from other sources (like Craigslist ads) has been known to appear mixed in with verified listings. Since their authenticity is a sometimes thing, that can be downright misleading. The upshot is that for serious house hunters, the best place to look for Las Vegas listings is right here, on a site like mine—where I have a daily Las Vegas connection with the properties that appear. Then, when you find the homes that look like they could be what you are looking for, all that’s left is to give me a call!
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