Clark County’s residential real estate market surged in May, according to the latest Market Action Report from the Regional Multiple Listing Service, showing strong gains even if some of the numbers didn’t quite hit the high marks set a year earlier.
“The Clark County real estate market continued to improve in May, in some respects even surpassing the typical seasonal pattern,” local real estate broker Mike Lamb wrote in his monthly analysis.
Pending sales rose to 904, a 3.1 percent increase over April and a 2.3 percent increase over May 2018. The 795 closed sales, on the other hand, fell 0.7 percent short of the May 2018’s 801 closings — although they did increase 17.6 percent from April, which saw 676 closings.
The year-to-date closing numbers are still being dragged down by February, Lamb wrote, which saw substantial decreases across the board due to a couple of weeks of snowy weather.
New listings also showed a substantial monthly gain coupled with a slight year-over-year loss: 1,272 new listings in May compared with 1,140 in April — an 11.6 percent increase — and 1,282 in May 2018, a 0.8 percent decrease.
The region’s inventory — an estimate of the number of months it would take to sell through the current listings — fell from 2.4 to 2.3 months, and market time decreased from 58 days to 49, both indicating a slight decrease in inventory for May — although the 2.3-month figure was substantially higher than the 1.8 reported in May 2018 and the 1.6 reported in May 2017.
Increases in sales activity along with increases in listing activity suggest that improved inventory has spurred improved sales, Lamb wrote, and the pattern has continued for the past few months.
“It also suggests the most important feature of the market this year has been the improvement in listing activity,” he wrote. “That improvement has resulted in a trend toward a more balanced market, which is much more sustainable over the long term.”
Home prices rose in May following a brief downturn in April; the average sale price rose from $391,000 to $410,200, and the median sale price rose from $360,000 to $375,000.
The year-to-date average sale price for 2019 is now $400,100, compared with $385,600 at this point in 2018; the median sale price to date is $364,400 compared with $350,000 as of May 2018.
In the monthly report from John L. Scott real estate, CEO J. Lennox Scott offered a breakdown of sales activity by price range, which showed that the highest sales activity is occurring for listings below $350,000, compared to more moderate sales rates on homes in the $350,000-750,000 range and slower activity above $750,000.
Not coincidentally, the report also points to extreme shortages in unsold listings for homes in both the $0-250,000 and $250,000-350,000 ranges, with less than a month’s supply of unsold homes in both categories.
