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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Southern Nevada existing home sales steady in July

The real estate market in Las Vegas valley, including in Summerlin, Seven Hills, Green Valley and Henderson, had several strong months late in the spring and heading into the summer, mostly because of low mortgage rates and ever more affordable prices. Those two conditions sure do have that something extra to attract buyers, in this day and age generally first-timers and investors, to make a play for it.

GLVAR, or the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, affirms that for July the statistics are still relatively strong, although some slowdown from previous months is evident. The single-family home inventory inched lower by 0.9%, from 20,613 in June to 20,423. It is gradually coming down. Many housing experts in Las Vegas would like to see it do so a bit faster. It is down, though, by 12.8% from last year.

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Energy Efficient Mortgage by FHA assists homeowners with utility bills

FHA Energy Efficient Mortgage, or EEM, has been available for years but hasn't really caught on that well. Not yet anyway. Washington is just now tooling up a national campaign to highlight the importance of energy conservation in housing. It's allocating a lot of resources to it. As a result the EEM is for sure going to get more media exposure in the coming months and could even be enhanced with some additional incentives.

FHA EEM basically works now like this. The borrower would purchase or refinance a principal residence, going through a standard FHA home loan approval process, and then can add the cost of energy efficient improvements on top of the mortgage. He doesn't need to qualify for the extra money nor is it part of the down payment calculations. One- to four-unit existing and new properties are the real thing.

The cost of improvements that may be eligible under FHA EEM is the lesser of the two below:

- The actual total of cost-effective energy improvements, as well as the cost of the report and inspections, or
- The lesser of 5% of:
- The value of the home, or
- 115% of the median area value of a single-family home, or
- 150% of the conforming Freddie Mac limit. Kind of complicated right here.

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