The million-dollar question: When will the market bottom out?

Q: What would you recommend to a potential homeowner or investor in this market? Are there darker days to come for the housing market? Will sales and development activity decline even further? - Henry S., Las Vegas

A: I can answer the first part of your question with two words: buy now.

As president of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, I've spent an increasing amount of time lately answering such questions and sharing information with members of the public, the media and others. This includes friends, neighbors, people in the real estate industry and people from other states who are looking to buy homes here.

It seems like everyone wants to know how our local housing market is doing and what might happen in the near future. I tell them all the same thing.

Of course, for people looking to sell properties right now, the local housing market has certainly been better. But I see the number of homes listed on the market starting to decline and am confident that home sales and prices will soon rebound.

There are a number of good reasons for this optimism. Just count the construction cranes building billion-dollar resorts along the Las Vegas Strip. These projects will be adding tens of thousands of jobs to our local economy in the next few years. These people will need places to live, and many of them will want to buy their own home.

These buyers will find they have more housing choices here than ever before, including homes in popular suburban areas on the edges of town in master-planned communities like Summerlin, Green Valley, Aliante and many others; or they may choose one of the new luxury high-rise lofts or condos on the Strip like those at Project CityCenter.

The GLVAR continues to reinforce the message that people who may be waiting for the bottom of the housing market should begin looking before market conditions change. There is no way to predict when, or if, prices are going to drop. So, serious buyers should be prepared to act before the market shifts.

Unfortunately, I don't think that there is any accurate way to predict what will happen in the housing market with absolute certainty. However, looking at a variety of factors, including our local economy, historically low interest rates and unmatched housing choices, I think it is safe to say that our housing market will pick up in the next few years.

In fact, we were pleased to see a detailed study say as much a few weeks ago when the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association released a report from a top local research firm called Applied Analysis that made a strong case for a housing shortage by late 2009 or 2010.

We agree that this is a distinct possibility and hope more people begin to respond to this information and take advantage of current market conditions favoring buyers.

Once more people come to understand what's really happening here, I think consumers will become more confident in the state of the local housing market. Once that happens, sales and development activity will increase.

And given the history of Las Vegas, things can change pretty quickly here.

Devin Reiss is the president of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. To ask Reiss a question, e-mail him at ask@glvar.org. All questions to Reiss may be shortened and are subject to editing.