The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Las Vegas home values climbed faster than the national average in the past year, a new report shows. The median estimated home value in the Las Vegas area last month was $222,900, up 10.2 percent from a year earlier, according to listing service Zillow. Read More
Train N Tour, LLC is now in Phoenix, AZ! Join us on January 19 to take a VIP tour of new home sites and models of the Trilogy® at Verde River™ in our executive luxury motor coach.
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We would like to extend a Thank You to Michael J. Sweeney for making all of this possible as well as congratulate him for being named the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association “Associate of the Year”.
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From the Home Builders Research, Inc
In November there were 762 new home recorded sales. This places our 2016 total at 7,035, a year to year increase of 890 closings, or 14.5 percent. It certainly appears that the new home segment of the Las Vegas housing industry is ending this year on a much stronger pace than we envisioned back in the first quarter of 2016. At the beginning of this year we felt that 2016 would produce a single digit year to year increase in new home closings. Although there were some positive signals from the area economists, there were still a lot of things that might limit new home sales in 2016, many of which we have discussed in our previous newsletters during the year.
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By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
Southern Nevada Home Builders Association
The Southern Nevada Home Builders Association recently launched a new “Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas” marketing campaign to promote builder members’ new homes.
The campaign centers around the recently launched website, www.BuyNewHomesLV.com, which was developed by a subcommittee of the association’s Sales and Marketing Committee, SNHBA member Team AMC advertising agency and SNHBA online partner Builders Digital Experience.
The multi-media campaign presents information about the value of newly constructed homes compared with resale homes, and encourages potential homebuyers to ‘start fresh’ by purchasing a newly constructed home.
The association wants homebuyers to make an informed decision. For those who ask, ‘Is a new home the best choice for me?’ – knowing all the benefits can help them avoid a purchase that they won’t be happy with in the long run. They’re likely to incur significant, unexpected costs by purchasing an older resale home.
People lost track of the dream of homeownership over the past few years. The recession caused potential homebuyers to rethink their financial decisions, and rightly so. But when it comes to weighing the financial benefits of a new home compared with a resale home, buyers should consider more than just the sales’ prices.
A lot of people think new homes are more expensive based on sales’ prices and that’s where they stop. If they continue doing the math, they’ll find there’s much more to it – lower costs and more benefits. If they do the math, they’ll find there’s a lot of savings buying a new home, not only in lower monthly utility bills, but also lifestyle benefits.
The lifestyle benefits are huge. Everything is new – all the systems, appliances and materials, so from the start, buyers enjoy long-term warranty protection and years of repair-free living. With a new home, the buyer chooses their neighborhood and floorplan, and they can personalize the home to their own tastes. New home communities offer amenities that older communities don’t include, such as community centers, recreational amenities, trails and parks.
The Las Vegas real estate market is unique. We’ve seen a slow, measured, sustainable pattern of growth over the past several years that is projected to continue. Now, new homebuyers get more value than ever before, and nowhere is that more true than Las Vegas.
THE BLOOMBERG REPORT
The article, Millions of Spenders Are Ready to Come Back From the Mortgage Crisis, from www.bloomberg.com, reports that the number of people joining the rolls of those knocked from homeownership peaked seven years ago, so those blotches to their histories are starting to roll off the books right about now. The resulting improvement in credit scores means more Americans will find themselves with the ability and means to once again apply for loans, and not just for home purchases. “Improving credit scores might entice households to start borrowing more in general,” said Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at real estate search engine Trulia. And what better time than now, when interest rates are so low. Negative events such as short sales, when a home is sold for less than what’s owed on it, and foreclosures generally roll off a person’s credit report after seven years, according to the three major providers of consumer credit scores and reports: Experian Plc, Equifax Inc. and TransUnion. With that anniversary fast approaching, better access to credit may be on the way for many. The obvious effect will be in stronger demand for homes, which may also translate into higher spending on durable goods such as appliances and furnishings, said Oubina. Consumers may also feel more comfortable applying for new credit cards, auto loans or other types of debt. A TransUnion study last year estimated that of the approximately 7 million consumers who were negatively impacted as the housing bubble burst -– including those who were either severely delinquent on their mortgages, negotiated a short sale or went into foreclosure — only 1.2 million had recovered enough by December 2014 to meet Fannie Mae selling guidelines. Based on their credit histories, the agency estimated that 2.2 million more could meet those criteria through 2019.
Here is the link to the entire article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-07/america-s-post-foreclosure-consumers-are-ready-to-rejoin-economy
By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
Southern Nevada Home Builders Association
The association is pleased to roll out a new multimedia marketing campaign – “Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas” to educate potential home buyers about the benefits of purchasing a newly built home.
The campaign is centered on a new website, www.BuyNewHomesLV.com, which gives site visitors lots of information about the advantages of buying new, and numerous search features to find the new home in metro Las Vegas that’s right for them.
Buying a brand new home is one dream worth pursuing because it makes sense in so many ways – emotionally, geographically and financially. A lot of people lost track of that dream over the past few years. The Great Recession caused everyone to rethink their financial decisions, and rightly so. But when it comes to weighing the financial benefits of buying a new home versus a use one, buyers need to consider more than just the sales’ price.
The Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas campaign will help buyers navigate the dilemma of whether they should consider buying a new home or a resale by offering long-term cost comparisons and other benefits to consider.
The association wants home buyers to have all the information they need to make an informed decision. If home buyers consider all the benefits of buying a new home, they’re going to make a decision that brings them happiness for years to come – not headaches and heartaches of problem-solving and surprise costs for repairs and improvements to a used home.
Home builders use the latest high-performance materials that are more energy efficient, which means much lower utility costs compared with older homes.
A lot of people believe that a new home is more expensive to buy than a used home – they look at the sales’ prices and that’s where they stop. But they need to continue doing the math. They’ll discover there’s much more to it than just sales’ price. It’s not unusual to buy a used home and discover very quickly that you need to immediately spent thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, on repairs and upgrades. You might discover you need a new roof – that’s about $40,000. You might need a new HVAC unit – that’s several thousand dollars. You don’t have those bills with a new home.
The lifestyle benefits are huge. Everything is new – all the systems, appliances and materials. So from the start, buyers enjoy long-term warranty protection and many years of repair-free living. They can choose their favorite floorplan and personalize it to meet their own tastes and needs.
The fact is, new home buyers now enjoy more value than ever before, and nowhere is that more true than in Las Vegas.
By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
The Southern Nevada Home Builders Association recently announced that Las Vegas-based Harmony Homes is the first builder to sign up to participate in its new “above code” program, which is part of the association’s Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership program.
Harmony Homes will incorporate the “above code” program requirements at three of its subdivisions: Malibu in North Las Vegas, and Daybreak and Talus, both of which are on the east side of the Las Vegas Valley.
The association’s green building program allows production builders who construct single-family homes in Southern Nevada to exceed the 2012 International Energy Conservation Code in an “above code” program. The above-code features required in the program produce electric, gas, and water savings beyond current code requirements.
Last year, SNHBA partnered with ConSol – Home Energy Efficiency Rating Services (CHEER) provider, to re-launch the Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership program, which promotes energy efficient and environmentally sensitive home building in metropolitan Las Vegas. The “above code” program was added at that time.
CHEERS administers the program on behalf of the association. The company has provided energy solutions for builders, government agencies, utilities, trade associations and developers in the Southwest since 1983.
The Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, the largest and oldest trade association representing the residential construction industry in Nevada, and the Green Building Initiative of Portland, Ore., formed the Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership in 2005.
The green building program provides technical expertise to help local builders implement the requirements of the program; administers impartial third-party inspection and verification by certified HERS raters, and issues certification that the home is constructed to the requirements.
The association was very proud when the city of Las Vegas adopted the Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership as the residential component of its Green Building Program in 2007.
The program certified 227 local homes – 187 were constructed by Pulte Homes and 40 were constructed by Pinnacle Homes.
Unfortunately, the program went on hiatus in the late 2000s when the economic downturn hit metropolitan Las Vegas. The association is pleased that conditions are right for the re-launch of the program. It’s a win-win for the building industry, our homebuyers and our community.
Green building, with its “above code” and high-performance features, is important to the home building industry, consumers and the nation because it promotes lower total ownership costs through utility savings and increased durability as well as an improved indoor living environment.
It also encourages environmental awareness and stewardship and more efficient use of increasingly scarce resources and helps to conserve them for future generations. Voluntary, non-prescriptive green programs provide builders and consumers with the flexibility that they need to construct homes that are sustainable, affordable, cost-effective and appropriate to the home’s geographic location.
In a competitive market, builders can differentiate themselves by building green homes.
Also, we thank our outstanding Associate-member companies that supported the Expo with booths and sponsorships: Cox Communications, Elite Flooring Plus, Finance of America, First American Title Co., Freedom Mortgage, Las Vegas Builder Trade-In Program, Las Vegas Review-Journal, New American Funding, NV Energy, SalesTraq, Security National Mortgage, Southern Nevada Water Authority and Washington Federal.
But in particular, we must single out for a special “thank you” our member, Mike Sweeney of Finance of America, who conceived the idea for the Expo and did a remarkable job putting it together and managing the event. Mike assembled a small, but outstanding team of professionals to coordinate the Expo. Also, our member, Claire DeJesus of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, deserves a “thank you” for being a guardian angel, watching over the event to ensure its success.