Southern Nevada home sales increase again

Las Vegas homeowners and would-be buyers are anxiously keeping an eye on the local real estate market. Homeowners want to see the price slide to finally come to halt as they've already lost a large chunk of equity during the last few years. Prospective buyers are trying to gauge when the time is ripe to make a move and purchase a home before values start climbing again.

The situation appears to be slowly turning favorable for both groups. As reported by the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, or GLVAR, prices seem to be stabilizing now. In May the median single-family house price moved up a notch from the previous month and in June it slipped 4.9%, so it's bouncing along within a narrow band now. The actual median price came in at $225,000. Compared with the June of 2007 price, the drop is much wider at 26.2% and that can make anyone wonder how did that happen.

The truly positive trend that has industry observers raving is the sales volume of single-family houses. According to GLVAR 2,226 homes were sold in June, up from 2,026 in May. But the remarkable thing here is the year-to-year improvement which grew a whopping 50.8%. That's right, 50 some percent better than in June of 2007.

As has been the case in the last several months, mortgage lender foreclosures again played a big role in the sales numbers. REOs, or real estate owned, have generally accounted for about half of recent closings, but in June they carved out an even larger share of the pie, 65% in all. Regardless, the key thing here is to burn the inventory further down as soon as possible.

Talking about the single-family house listing inventory, another critical element to a healthy housing market, it has edged upward over the last several months which still causes some concern. It moved higher an insignificant 0.2% in June to 23, 388 homes, but is lower by 1.1% from a year ago.

The real estate news from Las Vegas are cautiously getting better. Let's hope there is staying power to it.