Home buying heats up in Summerlin

Today’s housing market in Summerlin and its surrounding areas runs the gamut from a 1963 property selling for $70,000 up to a Tournament Players Club golf course property listed at $15 million with more than 13,000 square feet.

Nyna and Becky Calleros are looking for something in between. Together 12 years, they both own homes but wanted to buy one as a couple. They began looking in February near Summerlin for a home with at least 2,000 square feet and a big backyard.

This day, they were in The Lakes with Realtor Jodi Tyra. They were checking out a 2,207-square-foot home with four bedrooms and three bathrooms.

“If you’re a buyer, prices are at an all-time low, though it may be difficult to find a property because of multiple offers,” Tyra said. “I sold a house with the same square footage as this one in The Lakes a year ago for $170,000. This one is on the market today for $240,000. And the one I sold for $170,000 had a pool and was on a larger lot. So, prices are definitely headed up.”

She said homes under $250,000 can expect multiple offers with the seller getting at, or above, list price.

The Calleroses toured the house and remarked on the layout, new paint and carpet. They’d originally started house hunting when foreclosures came with punched-out walls and stolen appliances and fixtures.

“A lot of them were destroyed,” Nyna Calleros said. “One was missing the kitchen.”

Foreclosures once accounted for almost half of all home sales in Las Vegas, according to SalesTraq. They are now about 15 percent of the market.

Tyra took them to another house nearby. This one had more square footage, but the kitchen had 6-inch tiles with dirty grout, and someone had patched the backsplash with gobs of sealant. The bathrooms were outdated.

Nyna Calleros shrugged at the lackluster appearance. She is into do-it-yourself projects and pulled up pictures on her smartphone with “before” and “after” shots of her current bathroom, which she recently revamped.

Realtor Barbara Zucker said the housing market is in flux right now. There are so few homes being sold that sellers can get multiple bids almost immediately. But that presents a problem with bidding wars, she said, adding that it’s a problem for both parties.

“If they don’t have cash, and they need to go for a loan ... when the banks get (the house) appraised for the loan, the numbers aren’t working out,” Zucker said.

Those deals often fall through.

SalesTraq reported a median price of $130,000 in December for existing Las Vegas homes, up nearly 24 percent from a year ago. The median price for the year grew by 10.7 percent.

Realtor Amanda Brown of Nevada Realty Solutions said the current market is seeing 400-450 short sales. Short sales are those that are lender-approved for less than the principal mortgage balance. They accounted for a record 45.8 percent of December sales, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.

“It’s kind of the norm now,” she said.

Buying a short-sale home includes waiting. Nevada is a super-lien state, so all liens have to be addressed to clear the title. The process averages 45-90 days, Brown said.

Banks are happy to have short sales versus foreclosures, she said, because with the latter, the banks pay various expenses, such as homeowner association dues, property taxes, replacing carpet and any missing appliances and the upkeep on pools and lawns.

“They, on average, can spend an extra $30,000 to $50,000 more on a foreclosure than they do on a short sale,” Brown said.

Tim Kelly Kiernan of Re/Max Extreme, 107 E. Warm Springs Road, said a normal market for Las Vegas was when there were 9,000-10,000 homes for sale. Right now, there are 3,500 –– a seller’s market.

Kiernan recalled listing a house and getting seven offers the first day.

“Some of those people didn’t even go look at the house,” he said. “They just looked at the pictures on MLS and made an offer.”

In January 2012, his figures showed that the average sale price hovered at $129,000. A year later, it was about $170,000.

He said Summerlin was doing better than other parts of the city.

“It was wounded a little but not dramatically like (other places),” he said.

He said another housing foreclosure bubble had yet to play out, with as many as 50,000 homeowners having their bank foreclose on them.

“Will we recover? Absolutely,” Kiernan said. “It might be another, you know, three to seven years before we get back to a normal market, in my opinion.”

Out-of-state buyers with money are snatching up properties. Adrienne Lewis of Prudential Americana Group, 9402 Del Webb Blvd., told of showing a buyer 13 properties in one day and having him put in three bids.

“They were a past client from California, in town looking for investment property,” she said.

Rob Jensen heads a luxury real estate firm, the Rob Jensen Co., at 10161 Park Run Drive, Suite 150, which specializes in guard-gated real estate.

He said the high-end market has been heating up. Recent listings include a 15,802-square-foot, two-story home on a 1.24-acre lot in Queensridge listed for $8,495,000, which sold for $7 million.

Another listing, in Peccole Ranch, was a 9,303-square foot, Italian villa-style home that sold for $6.6 million. It “transports one to Tuscany” with 200-year-old iron entry gates and a courtyard well from 1878, according to its listing.

Popular items for high-end homes include wine cellars, elevators, swim-up bars and lazy river pools, spa-like master bathrooms, workout gyms and home theaters.

Big garages are also popular. A high-end home currently on the market includes one with 24 bays.

“Most of these homes sell for cash,” Jensen said.

How hot is the market for luxury homes?

“It’s rocking right now,” he said. “There were 302 closed sales in guard-gated communities in the last 12 months on the west side. The average was 4,676 square feet, with a low of 2,160 and a high of 15,802. ... There is incredible value in the luxury home market right now. We have a listing for $3,595,000. The seller put over $5 million into the home ... it’s not a short sale, but the seller’s loss is the buyer’s gain.”

Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 702-387-2949.