Southern Nevada housing values slow to recover

Moody's Economy.com analyst believes real estate values will take a long while to reach the levels they got to around 2006, the peak year of this recent ultra expansion. Prices shot up at a rather steep curve and then slammed into a wall and plunged at a scary velocity. With that disintegration a lot of other economic fundamentals were thrown out the window, too, and there seemingly are the seeds to the sluggish housing recovery.

Real estate prices will take 20 years to reach the earlier high point in California and Florida, the Moody's Economy.com forecast asserts. That's entirely possible knowing what those states have gone through. Arizona and Nevada, especially the Las Vegas valley, are conspicuously absent in it, although they are as a rule considered among the four most bubbling ones and then later the most distressed ones, sporting as severe mortgage foreclosure numbers and terrible housing market conditions as the other two.

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FICO's new version more tolerant

Home loan applicants are very familiar with FICO, the popular scoring model that has a lot to do with the type of a mortgage and interest rate they could qualify for. In addition to being broadly employed in most consumer credit requests, it's today also checked in many other situations, like in employment and insurance.

FICO 08 is the brand new update of the model, warm out of the oven. It is calibrated seemingly once a year to echo what is going on in the credit marketplace, as it should be. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, the big three, have already put their arms around it.

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Las Vegas resale housing numbers down some in August

Southern Nevada - with communities of Henderson, Summerlin, Green Valley, Sunrise Manor and North Las Vegas - real estate market slowed up slightly as the summer progressed, in fact to no surprise. July was already a little weaker than the several previous months that had been increasingly strong. Mortgage rates remain very desirable, as do home prices, but even these factors weren't enough to prevent a cautious slide down.

GLVAR, or Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, tells the world this time that 3,229 single-family houses were sold in August, a 14% drop from July. That's one thing, while the other is that in August of last year the sales number was merely 2,545, so in that comparison the action this year is still rather good.

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Southern Nevada housing among most affordable again

Las Vegas valley - like Green Valley, Summerlin, Henderson, Anthem, Spring Valley and Eldorado - was fast pricing itself out of the real estate market a few years ago. The recent unbelievable boom pushed property values way past the average household income, forcing many to buy homes with exotic mortgages that they really couldn't afford, or leaving others out of the market altogether.

That was the flavor of the Sin City housing scene then. Things, fortunately, have changed quite a bit from those days.

BusinessWeek.com and a research operation Reis made some highly advanced calculations to rank the top 20 cheapest real estate markets in the entire nation. The study actually compared how much it costs to own and maintain a home vs. renting one. Reis compiled these figures from its own second quarter rent stats and from Zillow.com's second quarter home price data. And the envelope, please.

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Las Vegas home buyers take note, walkable neighborhoods command higher prices

Real estate, as everybody says, is all about location, location, location, and that seems to be backed up by a new study commissioned by CEOs for Cities. It's a national cross-sector group of urban movers and shakers from business, academic, philanthropic and civic arenas dedicated to building and sustaining the next generation of viable American cities. They if anyone ought to be in the know on this topic.

The study is titled 'Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities' and was prepared by Joseph Cortright from Impresa, a Portland consulting shop. All in all, what was determined was how the proximity of homes to services like schools, shopping, libraries, parks and restaurants - even mortgage and real estate offices someone would like throw in - shapes values. To prepare this report researchers looked at 94,000 home sales in 15 different markets with the data supplied by ZipRealty. It found out that in 13 of them residences within walking distance of standard services clearly benefited from higher prices.

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