Most homes for sale in Las Vegas are unaffordable to typical buyer

As house-hunters face high prices and elevated borrowing costs, most homes on the market in Las Vegas are out of reach to the typical buyer.

That’s according to a new report from personal-finance site Bankrate, which found that only 14 percent of available homes in Southern Nevada were affordable to the typical household in the region.

Nationally, the share of affordable homes was around 25 percent, said Bankrate analyst Alex Gailey.

Southern Nevada’s population has grown fast for decades, fueled in no small part by its history of relatively low housing costs. But record-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates have now made it increasingly difficult for many would-be buyers to afford a purchase in the Las Vegas Valley, and sales totals are tumbling.

According to Bankrate’s study, the typical Las Vegas-area household needs to earn around $33,600 of additional income to afford a median-priced home.

The income gaps were even wider in other metro areas.

“With wages struggling to keep up, housing affordability has reached historically low levels in recent years,” Bankrate reported.

Gailey told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Southern Nevada is “faring worse” than many other metro areas and that the path to homeownership is “significantly harder today” than it was before the pandemic.

As she described it, the math around buying a home across the country has changed, as it is “no longer as realistic as it used to be.”

She also noted that buyers who come to Las Vegas from pricier cities are more likely to be able to afford a place.

All told, UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate reported in September that Las Vegas’ housing market was “largely unaffordable for much of the local population.”

Buyers picked up 1,538 previously owned single-family homes in Southern Nevada last month, down 6.6 percent from November 2024, according to trade association Las Vegas Realtors.

The median sales price last month was an all-time high of $488,995, up nearly 2 percent from a year earlier, the group reported.

On the construction side, builders closed 738 home sales in October in Southern Nevada, down 31 percent from the same month last year, according to Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research.

The median sales price, $535,995, was up 2.5 percent from a year earlier — and slightly below the all-time high, from August, of $536,471.

Overall, builders closed nearly 8,400 home sales this year through October, down 18 percent from the same 10-month stretch last year, the firm reported.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.