Clark County’s residential housing market numbers were “sunny across the board” according to the latest Market Action report from the Regional Multiple Listing Service.
Pending sales jumped 4.9 percent to 924, which also represents an 11.5 percent gain from July 2018. According to the report, it was the strongest July for pending sales since 2005.
Closed sales also rose to 831, jumping 4.4 percent from June and 5.3 percent from July 2018, making it the strongest July since 2015.
New listings grew to 1,160, a 5.3 percent increase over June and a 1.1 percent increase over July 2018. In his own monthly report, local real estate agent Mike Lamb noted that there were more new listings in July than in any prior month this year.
“That is not typical for July, which normally sees new sales activity taper off,” he wrote.
The region’s inventory in months — an estimate of how many months it would take to sell through the existing backlog — remained at 2.4 months, marking its fifth consecutive month at or very near that level.
There were 2,493 active listings available at the end of the month, Lamb wrote, which represents an increase compared to July 2018, July 2017 and July 2016 — although it’s still less inventory than in July of any year from 2006 to 2015.
The average sale price for Clark County rose to $413,100, compared with $402,700 in June and $407,200 in July 2018. The median sale price grew as well, rising from $359,900 in July 2018 and $372,500 in June 2019 to $379,000 last month.
Lamb added a note of caution about the pending sales numbers in his report: based on anecdotal conversations with other brokers, he said he’d heard that a “significant percentage” of the new pending sales in July were replacing previous pending sales that fell apart without closing.
“The RMLS data does not track that,” he wrote. “But the fact that brokers are seeing more sales fail is at least noteworthy. It is also noteworthy that those failed sales were replaced quickly.”
Those failed and replaced sales could reflect changing buyer sentiments or the growth in the region’s inventory, he wrote — but it could also just be a coincidence, and it’s too soon to tell.
In another monthly report from John L. Scott Real Estate, CEO J. Lennox Scott offered a breakdown of sales activity by price range, showing substantial variation between the upper and lower ends of the market in terms of housing availability.
For homes priced below $250,000, Lennox’s report showed 43 pending sales compared to just 49 new listings, with more than two-thirds of new listings selling within their first 30 days on the market. Similarly, the $250,000-$350,000 range showed 268 pending sales against 286 new listings, with 71.4 percent of new listings sold within their first 30 days on the market.
Those numbers resulted in only about one month of available inventory at those lower price levels, according to Lennox’s report, compared to a month and a half at the $350,000-$500,000 range, more than two months at the $500,000-$750,000 range and more than five months at the $750,000-$1 million range.
