The Clark County housing market saw an overall cool-down in February, with most market numbers showing a decline. According to local real estate agent Mike Lamb, inclement weather was a major contributor to the chilly market.
“February’s snowy weather slowed real estate activity in Clark County significantly,” Lamb wrote in his monthly report. “In fact, brokers have said it was like there were only three weeks of productive activity in February.”
Closed and pending sales both improved over the previous month but declined year-over-year, and new listings saw a steep decline. That’s according to the latest market action report from the regional Multiple Listing Service.
The winter weather had the biggest impact on new listings, according to Lamb. New listings dropped to 732 – a 3.8 percent decrease from February 2018 and a 14.9 percent decrease from January of this year.
Pending sales decreased 7.4 percent year-over-year, and were also lower than in February 2017, 2016 and 2015, according to Lamb’s report. The 634 reported pending sales did slightly exceed the 628 reported in January, Lamb noted that usual seasonal trends often result in a double-digit increase over January rather than a 1 percent rise.
Closed sales rose to 512 compared to January’s 474, an 8 percent increase, but that total was 7.6 percent short of February 2018’s 554 closed sales. Still, Lamb noted, closed sales remained relatively high in recent historical terms, exceeding the February closed sales number for every other year since 2006.
“Considering the inclement weather, the market was really good in February,” he wrote. “In fact, if you arbitrarily say the impact of the lost week was a twenty percent reduction in new sales activity, the numbers for February would have been outstanding.”
February’s data brings the year-to-date sales figure for Clark County to 1,135, Lamb noted, which is a 5 percent decline compared to 2018 but still exceeding the sales rates from all prior years since 2006.
The region’s inventory in months — an estimate of the amount of time it would take to sell through the current inventory — dropped to 2.9 in February. The number had climbed to 3.2 in January, which was the highest number reported by the Regional Multiple Listing Service since at least the beginning of 2016.
Home prices were the one area where the weather didn’t seem to have any major impact, Lamb noted. The average price of a home in Clark County over the past 12 months was $396,100, according to RMLS data, compared to an average price of $367,500 for the 12 months ending with January 2018 — an increase of 7.8 percent. Median home prices grew by the same percentage, from $330,300 to $356,000.
The snow-induced chill likely won’t have much of a long-term impact on sales, Lamb predicted — pending sales appear to have bounced back in the first half of March, he wrote, putting Clark County on pace for a very strong month.
“It appears the weather just pushed more sales activity into March,” he wrote.
Still, he said, the decrease in new February listings came at a time when the market would normally expect to see a rise in listings, which could create some strain for the Clark County market’s inventory, which has already been struggling to keep pace with sales. Lamb concluded his report with a similar assessment to previous months: “we really need more good listings.”
