If there ever was going to be a buyer’s market in the city of Las Vegas, many people would argue that we have hit the time now. It is perhaps the first time in history (certainly the first time in recorded history) that property values have been down all across the city of Las Vegas. Because of its intimate connections to casinos and gambling, Las Vegas has always been a centre that has been able to weather a lot of the economic problems that the rest of the country has been experiencing. However, it appears that with a potential Second Great Depression on the way for not just the United States but the world market as well, Las Vegas has seen its fair share of tanking just like the rest of the property values in the rest of the country.
This was brought home in no finer way than by the selling of a house that was done by a casino manager in the city of Las Vegas just recently. The man’s name is K. Krishna Murthy and while he has not been a casino manager his whole life, he does have ties to the MGM Mirage Casinos. He worked the quality assurance department of the casino as the manager and therefore knows quite a bit about how things work in the gambling industry. Ever since leaving that post however he has been in portfolio management for InfoSys. When he and his wife Radhika sold their house on October 7th, the asking price they ended up getting for it was $414,510. The house is a four-bedroom and three-bathroom home and when they initially purchased it five years ago they paid $400,000 for it.
The house was worth a lot more than the just under $415,000 they got for it just a few months ago, but the softening housing market has really caused property values in the city of Las Vegas to tank. In 2008 alone the housing market in Las Vegas has seen around 14,500 sales with the median price of a home sale in Las Vegas being around $215,000. All of these numbers are somewhat complicated to interpret, but the bottom line that one has to draw after comparing time trends is that the housing market in Las Vegas has gone downhill big time. This is not the time to be selling homes in Las Vegas unless you really have no other choice, but it is the time to be purchasing property in preparation for the upward swing in the long term that absolutely has to come at some point in time.
Casinos are experiencing the property crunch as well, with many of them being forced to put projects on hold because the equity holdings of their current properties have not gotten them enough loan money to make the expansions they had planned before the bottom fell out of the market. When casinos will be able to get back on track is anybody’s guess, but chances are good it will not be anytime soon.
