Las Vegas Home Prices Up 24% in 2013

LAS VEGAS–Southern Nevada home prices ended 2013 on an upswing, with the median price of existing homes up 24% from the same time the year before, according to statistics released this week by the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors (GLVAR).

GLVAR reported that the median price of an existing single-family home sold in Southern Nevada during December 2013 was $185,000, up 1.1% from $183,000 in November and up 24.2% from December 2012, when the median price was $149,000. Meanwhile, the median price of existing condominiums and townhomes sold in December was $96,000, down 3% from $99,000 in November, but up 26.3% from $76,000 one year ago.

GLVAR President Heidi Kasama, a longtime local Realtor who succeeded 2013 president Dave Tina starting Jan. 1, said local home prices have been increasing for the past two years, though they have stabilized in recent months. She noted that GLVAR tracked a similar year-over-year increase in local home prices during 2012, when the median price of existing homes sold in Southern Nevada also increased by 24 percent from the start to the end of 2012.

“Local homeowners should be happy with the strong appreciation we've seen over the past two years,” Kasama said. “We haven't seen increases like this since the middle part of the last decade. Like most housing experts, I expect to see more stable home prices in 2014.”

Putting these recently rising home prices into perspective, she said existing local home prices bottomed out at a median price of $118,000 in January 2012 before appreciating for a record 19 straight months until September 2013. Local home prices are still well below their June 2006 peak of $315,000.

Of the 40,242 existing residential properties sold in Southern Nevada during 2013, GLVAR reported that 62% were traditional sales. That's a big jump from 2012, when only 37% of all 44,902 sales that year were traditional.