1st Anniversary “Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas”

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By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
Southern Nevada Home Builders Association

The Southern Nevada Home Builders Association recently marked the 1st anniversary of the “Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas” online marketing campaign designed to help local Realtors and potential homebuyers navigate the dilemma of deciding whether to purchase a newly constructed home or a resale home.

The campaign, based at the website, www.BuyNewHomesLV.com, provides information about the long-term cost comparisons and benefits to consider before buying any home.

Since the launch in July 2016, the website has attracted more than 43,000 users; 61,300 sessions; 64,600 page views; with an average visitor duration of six minutes. The association is pleased that this campaign has been such a success. Read More

Start Fresh Buy New Las Vegas

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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.

 

BUYNEWHOMESLV.COM

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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.

View From The Top

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By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
SNHBA

 

   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.

 

 

 

View From The Top

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By Nat Hodgson
Executive Director
SNHBA

The Southern Nevada Home Builders Association thanks our industry partner, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors and its members, for their contributions and efforts toward the success of our recent inaugural Real Estate Expo Las Vegas at the Cashman Center in downtown Las Vegas.

We’re still crunching the numbers and debriefing the sponsors and exhibitors, but we’re very pleased with the Expo, and we’re already discussing plans for the 2017 Real Estate Expo Las Vegas.

For the first time, the Expo brought together more than 3,000 members of the local home building industry, real estate professionals, potential homebuyers, homeowners and the general public to network and learn about our market. Despite the rain and cloudy skies that weekend, people turned out with enthusiasm to be a part of this event.

After so many years of economic downturn, it was great to see so many industry professionals come together at this energetic and information-packed event. There were nearly 200 attendees at the opening session, the Las Vegas Housing Outlook presentation by our member, Home Builders Research Inc. The Outlook presentation featured a special panel of experts – SNHBA President Frank Wyatt of Pinnacle Homes, GLVAR CEO Michelle Caprio and Bob Potts, research director at the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.

At the end of the first day, about 100 members of the home building industry and the Realtors came together for a joint SNHBA-GLVAR Industry Networking Mixer. We thank the Zillow and Trulia folks at Premier Agent for hosting that event.

Considering this was a first effort, most of the booths were very attractive and impressive. Our master-planned communities of Cadence, Inspirada, Skye Canyon and Summerlin had notable displays with excellent information about their builders and amenities.

We thank our builder-member companies that displayed at the Expo: American West Homes, CalAtlantic Homes, Century Communities, DR Horton, KB Home Pulte Homes, Richmond American, Shea Homes, StoryBook Homes, Toll Brothers, William Lyon Homes and Woodside 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.

 

 

 

View From the Top Vol 11

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SIX REASONS TO PURCHASE A HOME IN 2016

Is it really 2016 already? For those of you who happen to be planning on buying a home in the new year — or even just trying to — there’s a whole lot to celebrate. Why? A variety of financial vectors have dovetailed to make this the perfect storm for home buyers to get out there and make an (winning) offer. Here are six home-buying reasons to be thankful while ringing in the new year:

Reason No. 1: Interest rates are still at record lows

Even though they may creep up at any moment, it’s nonetheless a fact that interest rates on home loans are at historic lows, with a 30-year fixed-rate home loan still hovering around 4%.

“Remember 18.5% in the ’80s?” asks Tom Postilio, a real estate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate and a star of HGTV’s “Selling New York.””It is likely that we’ll never see interest rates this low again. So while prices are high in some markets, the savings in interest payments could easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of the mortgage.”

Reason No. 2: Rents have skyrocketed

Another reason home buyers are lucky is that rents are going up, up, up! (This, on the other hand, is a reason not to be thankful if you’re a renter.) In fact, rents outpaced home values in 20 of the 35 biggest housing markets in 2015. What’s more, according to the 2015 Rent.com Rental Market Report, 88% of property managers raised their rent in the past 12 months, and an 8% hike is predicted for 2016.

“In most metropolitan cities, monthly rent is comparable to that of a monthly mortgage payment, sometimes more,” says Heather Garriock, mortgage agent for The Mortgage Group. “Doesn’t it make more sense to put those monthly chunks of money into your own appreciating asset rather than handing it over to your landlord and saying goodbye to it forever?”

Reason No. 3: Home prices are stabilizing

For the first time in years, prices that have been climbing steadily upward are stabilizing, restoring a level playing field that helps buyers drive a harder bargain with sellers, even in heated markets.

“Local markets vary, but generally we are experiencing a cooling period,” says Postilio. “At this moment, buyers have the opportunity to capitalize on this.”

Reason No. 4: Down payments don’t need to break the bank

Probably the biggest obstacle that prevents renters from becoming homeowners is pulling together a down payment. But today, that chunk of change can be smaller, thanks to a variety of programs to help home buyers. For instance, the new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Home Possible Advantage Program allows for a 3% down payment for credit scores as low as 620.

Reason No. 5: Mortgage insurance is a deal, too

If you do decide to put less than 20% down on a home, you are then required to have mortgage insurance (basically in case you default). A workaround to handle this, however, is to take out a loan from the Federal Housing Administration — a government mortgage insurer that backs loans with down payments as low as 3.5% and credit scores as low as 580. The fees are way down from 1.35% to 0.85% of the mortgage balance, meaning your monthly mortgage total will be significantly lower if you fund it this way. In fact, the FHA predicts this 37% annual premium cut will bring 250,000 first-time buyers into the market. Why not be one of them?

Reason No. 6: You’ll reap major tax breaks

Tax laws continue to favor homeowners, so you’re not just buying a place to live — you’re getting a tax break! The biggest one is that unless your home loan is more than $1 million, you can deduct all the monthly interest you are paying on that loan. Homeowners may also deduct certain home-related expenses and home property taxes.

http://www.probuilder.com/six-reasons-purchase-home-2016?eid=253018236&bid=1265543