Our inventory of available homes is dropping and we reported 3,173 Las Vegas Home sales in July, a 56.5 percent increase from the same month a year ago, with our highest monthly totals since September of 2006, based on information released by SalesTraq.

There is a lot more data in the article and if you want to read it please click-through to the Las Vegas Review Journal site for much more analysis and statistics. But, like the Review Journal, we think one of the most valuable pieces of information impacting our local market is the ratio of Las Vegas Foreclosures homes sales being about 85% of the number of new foreclosures coming on the market.

What does this mean and why is it so important? Well, once these two numbers, foreclosures sold and available are balanced, this will mean banks are selling more Las Vegas homes than they are pushing into the market. And, we should move into in recovery mode; meaning, prices should stabilize, Las Vegas home availability (choices) will diminish and other positives may occur in our overall market, assuming broader economic issues do not come into play.

Finally, our foreclosure rates did go up 8.4% from June, based on SalesTraq data, which is not a positive sign. But, at this point, we believe the positives are outweighing the negatives and there is light at the end of the tunnel!