Las Vegas Foreclosures – Dreams in the Desert or Harsh Reality?

Surprise, surprise – the news media has been beating the drum about how bad the Las Vegas Foreclosure market is with dire warnings about impending doom and gloom. We disagree and hate to question national media, but our local market is unique when contrasted with other major cities that have experienced drops in real estate valuations. Don’t tell anyone – we may have hit bottom!

Some quick facts – we get 40M visitors to our fair city every year and some portion of them fall in love with Las Vegas and decide to relocate here. We should point out, about 20% of our visitors are from outside of the US and some percentage of them are buying second homes here and/or also relocating.

International interest in our real estate is further heightened by the dollar’s weakness against most major currencies – a charming pied-a-terre here for say $400K in one of our gorgeous high rises is a great deal versus a comparable spot in trendy St. Johns Wood in London for $1.5M!

Growth does wonderful things for any real estate market! Are we growing at warp speed like we’ve done in the go/go 90’s and later? No, we are not. But, we are growing – our job market has an unemployment rate at about 5.5% (approx), which is bit higher than the national average. But, you have to balance this out with our increase in population – we experienced a net gain of about 12% for calendar 2007.

What’s driving our population growth? We are realtor’s not statisticians – but, as we look out over the virtual and realworld landscape we can reference some major multi-billion mega development projects going on in the city such as our huge downtown City Center Project, the Echelon, Aliante Station in North Las Vegas, the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, the Palms Place and a number of others that are opening later this year or have opened.

These huge projects are fueling job growth and relocations to our fair city. Did we mention our local bird is the moving crane? You can’t drive a block without seeing one. But, don’t look too hard at the cranes – you don’t want the bottom of our real estate marketing hitting you when you aren’t paying attention.