Sunrise/Whitney offers everything from mansions to manufactured homes

The Las Vegas Valley housing market has been getting a lot of ink in the last few years, and until recently little of it has been positive. The valley was the tip of the spear point for the housing crisis, building up to spectacular highs and dropping just as dramatically. As the valley struggles through recovery, Sunrise and Whitney, with many older and well-established neighborhoods, have their own challenges.

“The northeast is definitely lagging behind in its recovery (compared with) some of the quote unquote more popular areas like the southwest, Summerlin, Green Valley and Anthem,” said Rochelle Vannoy, a Henderson-based Realtor. “Anything north of Cheyenne (Avenue) has been slow. There’s a buyer preference for those other areas.”

Vannoy said that it’s not as easy to pick the part of town you want to live in as it once was and that concerns such as price and availability are driving more people to second- and third-choice areas. Although the turnaround has been slower for Sunrise Manor, Vannoy doesn’t want to write it off.

“In some ways it’s a misunderstood area,” Vannoy said. “People just blanket it off, but there are actually some really nice areas up there.”

The Sunrise and Whitney areas have a wide range of housing. The area features some of the valley’s oldest and most densely packed manufactured housing with many residents who have lived in the neighborhood for several years. Only a few blocks away there are tracts of Mediterranean-style homes from the most recent boom. There are also patches of older, established ranch properties that have been enveloped by suburbia.

On the foothills of Frenchman Mountain one can see an amazing variety of homes, built primarily by private owners seeking their private visions of the dream home. A home modeled on a Japanese pagoda is just down the street from a Victorian mansion and a Spanish hacienda.

“There are some beautiful homes up above Hollywood (Boulevard), but they don’t go up for sale much,” Vannoy said. “There’s quite a bit of horse property on the east side of town, also, and that doesn’t come up very often, although I did just list a horse property in the southwest.”

Some of the valley’s most spectacular homes can be found near Sunset Park, 2601 E. Sunset Road. The most expensive home on the sales block by a long shot in the Sunrise/Whitney area is at 7000 Tomiyasu Lane. The compound was custom-built for the Primm family and took three years to complete. It was built to hotel quality standards, as the Primms were the original owners of Primm Valley Resorts in the town named for the family on Interstate 15 at the California border. The home is filled with the sort of luxury that most people can only dream of.

The compound is on 10 acres and boasts more than 21,000 square feet of buildings, including 10 bedrooms, a theater room, a museum and showroom designed to house 20 cars and additional garage space for seven more cars in three other garages.

A six-page briefing book on the property created by Synergy Sotheby’s International Realty lists amenity after luxurious amenity from cedar closets and a 25-foot-tall fireplace to a private indoor shooting range.

The asking price is $16.5 million.

On the other end of the scale, many homes on the eastside of the valley are listed at under $50,000. Recently the least expensive home in the area was listed for $27,500 just three miles from the Primm compound.

Rick Brenkus sells homes on both ends of the spectrum and in between. He and his wife, Teri, head the Brenkus Team of Keller Williams Realty. They move a lot of homes.

“I don’t think there’s anything particularly different about the way we sell homes in any part of the valley,” Rick Brenkus said. “The basic rules apply everywhere. We tell people to get preapproved, because the houses that can be sold are going quick, and we don’t want to slow down the process and have the house bought out from under you.”

That rule doesn’t apply to manufactured housing.

“None of the lenders want to touch manufactured housing with a 10-foot pole,” Vannoy said, “not even the hard money lenders. You have to have cash.”

Vannoy believes that most buyers who have the money are more likely to look for a house or a condo before a manufactured home, but he agrees that some people love living in them.

“The homes up near the (Robert E.) Bob Price Recreation Center are nice because you own the land, and if you’re a person who doesn’t want to deal with CC&Rs, they don’t have them,” Vannoy said. “There are some manufactured housing communities that have CC&Rs. They’re a nice place for people on a fixed income, and we get a lot of snowbirds looking at them.”

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 frequently 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.

“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 but that now, there are 3,500, and it’s 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.

View reporter Jan Hogan contributed to this report. Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.