Carpenter Sammy Hernandez works Tuesday atop a home being built in North Las Vegas. Some home builders said they have had to reduce their staffs as home sales have slowed. An observer said the slowdown may prompt some real estate agents to leave the business. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

A slowdown in the housing market is rippling through Las Vegas, with layoffs by home builders, mortgage and title companies and other real estate-related occupations. But some observers suggest the slowdown's scope and depth may not be not as far-reaching as national economists have predicted.

Southern Nevada Home Builders Association spokeswoman Monica Caruso said several home builders in the marketplace, probably less than half a dozen, have had to adjust their staffs.

"Some of the sales numbers are down, traffic is down and so they do not need to be staffed at the level that they were for the boom cycle that we are apparently coming off of," she said Tuesday.

Don DelGiorno, president of KB Home's Nevada division, said the company has reduced its local staff by about 10 percent, though it would be difficult to nail down an exact number.

"We're just adjusting to the market position," he said. "This is still a strong market. We've got strong growth and a great job market. It's just going to take a little time to correct."

KB, the No. 1 builder in Las Vegas, will probably fall short of last year's record 3,936 closings, a statistic that reflects what's going on across the valley, DelGiorno said.

"Sales are being challenged and different builders are feeling different kinds of pains," DelGiorno said. "With in-migration and jobs, we'll move through this inventory when people are buying their homes to live in. Now there's a concept."

Todd Hahn, division vice president for Pulte Homes, said he's heard reports of layoffs at other home builders, but that hasn't happened at Pulte.

"With the size of the operation we have, we always have people coming and going," he said. "But there's no department where we said, 'We could do without that.' Look at the number of homes we delivered last year."

Pulte, which includes the Del Webb brand, built 3,400 homes in Las Vegas last year and expects to close on another 4,500 this year, Hahn said.

Rather than hire more people on a temporary basis and spend three months training them, which amounts to a substantial investment in human resources, Pulte will stretch its current staff of about 600 employees and find more efficiencies to cover the short-term blip, Hahn said.

Dennis Smith, president of Home Builders Research, said of the layoffs: "It's normal in this part of the housing cycle we're in, the back side of the hump. Anytime you have that, there's going to be some cutbacks. That's the result of added staff that was put in place on the upside of the hill."

Washington Mutual, a home mortgage company with a large presence in Las Vegas, notified 1,400 U.S. workers last week that they would be cut from the payroll as part of a "cost-saving strategy." Most of the layoffs were in Washington and Florida.

Nevada Title Co. has reduced its staff by about 25 percent since peaking at more than 300 employees during the refinance boom of 2002 and 2003, Nevada Title President Robbie Graham said.

"We're a locally owned company. We have to stay lean and mean," she said. "We were pretty lucky. We had really small layoffs in December. We started managing it in December and we've let attrition take its toll."

Another field seemingly poised to shrink through attrition is real estate agents.

"There's going to be a lot of them cryin' the blues," Smith said.

The Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors doubled its membership to about 15,000 over the last five years as people from all walks of life saw an opportunity to cash in on the housing boom.

In a 2004 Review-Journal story about the wave of new people getting their real estate license, Debbie Smith said she made more in commissions from a few real estate transactions in Las Vegas than she made in a year as an elementary-school teacher in the Los Angeles.

"It was a new challenge," she said. "There's the chance to get ahead. It seems like you come out here and everybody's in the business. Realtors, title companies ... everything revolves around real estate and development."

Now, with more than 17,000 homes listed for sale on the MLS, many Realtors are having to scramble for clients. Competition intensifies. Those who are experienced and committed to the profession will survive, while those who got into the business to make a quick buck will jump ship, going back to what they used to do or finding another career, Dennis Smith said.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of "Freakonomics," wrote in an editorial for The New York Times Syndicate: "It would seem obvious that being an agent during a real estate boom is a great way to earn a good living. As it turns out, however, most agents don't make much money during a boom because of one simple fact: The boom attracts way too many of them."

Real estate licensees in California surged to an all-time high of 495,000 in April from a record 476,000 at the end of 2005, the California Department of Real Estate reports.

Graham of Nevada Title said she's looking at a 14 percent slowdown in the number of residential deeds handled by her company this year.

"Frankly, a lot of it is housing prices go up and interest rates surged. You pull people out of the market who can buy," she said.

Although sales of new homes in Las Vegas slowed 9.1 percent in April, the median price rose 18 percent to $333,117, statistics from Las Vegas-based SalesTraq show.

One major difference that's keeping new home prices up today from last year is that almost every builder is offering buyer incentives, ranging from a few thousand dollars on entry-level homes to $100,000 on luxury homes, SalesTraq President Larry Murphy said.

The construction industry accounts for 108,200 jobs in Las Vegas, an 11 percent increase from a year ago, March statistics from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation show.

Construction activity peaked in the last quarter of 2005 and has backed off in recent months, said Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Still, the center's construction index is up 11.9 percent from a year ago and there are indications that this cycle, as with those in the past, will turn to stronger growth in the spring and summer months, Schwer said.