Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

Those looking to buy a home in Las Vegas maybe shouldn't be holding their breath while they wait for prices to drop by double-digit percentages as predicted by many national real estate experts and reports.

Those predictions have been circulating, for years in some cases.

Ed Leamer of the University of California, Los Angeles' Anderson Research Center said Las Vegas home prices are overvalued by 30 percent or more and a crash is imminent. That was in 2002.

Most recently, Moody's Economy.com projected that home prices in Las Vegas will drop 13 percent and prices in Reno will drop 17 percent in the next year.

The reality is that home prices are no longer appreciating at the double-digit rate they did in 2004 and much of 2005, but they're not dropping, either.

The median price of a single-family home sold during September was $310,000, unchanged from the same month a year ago, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors reported Thursday. For condos and townhomes, the median sales price in September was $200,000, up 0.2 percent from a year ago.

Local real estate analysts do not necessarily agree with national studies that predict double-digit price declines in Las Vegas as part of the national slowdown.

Such studies generally don't give enough weight to local economic conditions, association President Linda Rheinberger said. None of them mention the lack of private land for development in Las Vegas or the continued job and population growth that sets the local economy apart from the rest of the country.

"All real estate is local," Rheinberger said. "Barring some sort of catastrophic event, we don't expect that (drop) to happen here. Instead, we see continued signs of what we call a soft landing, or market correction. We're not expecting local housing prices to drop by double digits. The history of our housing market makes that very unlikely."

While prices have remained stable, the number of sales has tailed off. The Realtors association showed 1,739 single-family home sales in September, down 41.7 percent from a year ago. A total of 438 condos and townhomes were sold, down 34.5 percent.

Home Builders Research reported 30,458 resale transactions in Las Vegas through August, a 24.4 percent decrease from a year ago.

Inventory of homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service continues to rise to record levels in both categories. Single-family listings are up to 20,815, a 57.4 percent increase from a year ago. Condo and townhome listings more than doubled from a year ago to 5,135.

Chris Biaggi, president of All Western Mortgage in Las Vegas, said he's seeing a stabilization in appraisals as home prices have reached their true value.

"That's what people have waited for," he said. "It's really become a buyer's market. You've got sellers participating in closing costs and you've got interest rates as low as they've been in the last few years. We've had our correction. You have to pick a time to jump in at some point."

Chicago developer Jim Letchinger knows the real estate industry is soft across the nation, but it didn't stop him from acquiring a 5-acre parcel at Tropicana Avenue and Grand Canyon Drive in July to build The Mercer, a $50 million mixed-use development with 113 residential units priced from $229,000 for one-bedroom units to $700,000 for three bedrooms.

"No matter what happens, there's 6,000 to 7,000 people a month moving to Las Vegas, and the hotel and casino industry in Las Vegas is not going down," he said. "Las Vegas will just continue to expand. That's the biggest reason. The fact of the matter is the market is not what it was three years ago, but there are still people out there with cash and capital looking to invest in real estate."

Rheinberger said the association's statistics show continued stability in the local housing market and people should be careful not to jump to any hasty conclusions.

"They look at sales down 17.1 percent from August and down 41.7 percent from September '05 and they want to jump off the bridge," she said. "What they don't factor in is '04 and '05 were anomalies. In the resales, we're going to have our third-best year on record and the second-best in new homes. So you have to be careful when you look at one piece of the puzzle."

The association's statistics are based on records from the Multiple Listing Service and do not necessarily account for newly constructed homes sold by local builders or other transactions not involving a Realtor.