Las Vegas couple say seventh home purchase will be their last

Editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series on people buying a home in Las Vegas.

Roma and Alan Haynes have moved around Las Vegas so many times that people say they don’t write the couple’s address in pen. They write it in pencil.

The serial buyers have purchased seven homes over the years, the latest being a newly built, one-story house in the southwest valley that they picked up this spring.

Roma, 69, says they’ll stay in this one “forever,” as they have “no reason to move again.”

“But we’ve said the same thing the last three homes,” Alan, 70, noted.

Thousands of homes are sold monthly in Southern Nevada. Resales dominate the market, but for new construction, builders notch the most deals in the southwest valley.

The area accounted for 45 percent of the valley’s new-home sales in July, with Henderson a distant second at 22 percent, according to Home Builders Research.

Here’s a look at recent buyers there and how they’ve fared over the years in Las Vegas’ never-boring, volatility-prone housing market.

Buying and selling

Roma, a retired Clark County management analyst who grew up in Las Vegas and St. George, Utah, and Alan, a retired elevator installer who was raised in Northern California, married in 1978.

They bought a duplex near Flamingo Road and Decatur Boulevard in 1979, followed by a single-family house a mile or so away in 1982, county records indicate.

The couple moved to northwest Las Vegas in 1989, buying a house in the Desert Shores area. They sold it in 2003 as the housing bubble was inflating.

A few months later, they bought a house off Alta Drive in Summerlin for $574,625. In early 2012, after the economy crashed and as the resale market was hitting bottom, they sold it for $490,000, property records show.

They more than recouped their losses with homes 5 and 6, however.

The couple bought a condo in Summerlin’s Mira Villa complex, near the JW Marriott Las Vegas, for $426,000 in early 2012. They sold it in the fall of 2014 for $664,000, records show. Roma says they received three cash offers, at the asking price, in the first week it was on the market.

Next, they bought a house off Sahara Avenue and Fort Apache Road, alongside the Canyon Gate golf course, for $427,500. They sold it this May for $564,000.

‘Bite off more than you can chew’

Before buying their current home, the Hayneses weren’t sure they wanted another one. They casually looked around, visiting some new housing tracts, but in a week or so had found a place.

“We’re impulsive,” Roma said.

They bought a three-bedroom, 2,870-square-foot house near Fort Apache and Oquendo roads for $509,408. The sale, by builder Pardee Homes, closed May 26, property records show.

The house is 400 square feet larger than their last one and has a “perfect layout,” Roma said. Alan’s sister lives with them, in a bedroom near the front of the home, and the couple has a small library, an art studio, a spare room for visitors and a larger-than-average kitchen island.

Financial-guidance counselors may disagree, but as Roma sees it, house hunters should “bite off more than you can chew” — buy a nicer place at the higher end of your price range.

She said wages usually tick higher over the years, helping buyers afford a more expensive place, and nicer, larger homes can fare well on resales.

Location also is critical when buying, she said, but so is timing.

When the market was booming last decade, people all over Las Vegas were flipping houses and buying and selling at bloated values. After the market crashed, unemployment soared, home prices plunged and buyers all over town lost their home to foreclosure or were deeply underwater.

“Sometimes,” Roma said, “it’s just a lot of luck.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.