Las Vegas midyear new-home sales highest since ‘08, report says

Las Vegas homebuilders have notched their highest mid-year sales total in almost a decade, a new report shows.

Builders closed 832 new-home sales in Clark County in June, putting the year’s sum at 4,267. That’s up 22.4 percent from the first half of 2016, according to Home Builders Research.

The median sales price of June’s closings was $339,603, up 3.7 percent from a year earlier.

Builders also pulled 1,035 new-home permits in June, the highest one-month tally since July 2008. It brought the mid-year permit tally to 5,004, up 5 percent from the same period last year.

Overall, the sales total for the first half of the year was the highest since 2008 but nowhere near the levels reached during and just before the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, Home Builders Research reported.

For instance, builders sold almost 9,900 homes in Clark County in the first half of 2000 and around 18,800 in the first six months of 2006.

“As good as the housing market presently seems, the volume of sales and production is not close to what it was prior to 2008,” Home Builders Research founder Dennis Smith and vice president Andrew Smith wrote in the report. “Will we ever again see the 2006 level of new housing sales and construction? Or, even the pace that we had in 2000? In our opinion, it certainly doesn’t look like it is at all possible.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.