Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines, and a slowing economy, Las Vegas Realtors reports that local home prices have hit a new record, News 3 Las Vegas reports.
The numbers. According to the agency, the median price of a home in Las Vegas is $325,000, which is $6,000 higher than the previous record of $309,000 set in March 2020, when the crisis was just beginning to affect the economy. It is also 6.9% higher than in June 2019.
Quote. “It’s not impacting the housing market the way that anyone expected,” says Tom Blanchard, president of Las Vegas Realtors. “We had a bit of a downturn at the beginning of the outbreak, but now people are used to it.”
The reasons. According to Blanchard and local economist David Grana of Vegasnomics, COVID-19 has had an unexpected effect on the Las Vegas market. The pandemic and economic downturn have prompted many people to leave California’s densely populated cities and head east, seeking less densely populated areas that also tend to have lower taxes. “People want to get out of dense areas,” Grana says. “They want to get out of high-density housing and move to a place where they have more space.” Potential out-of-state homebuyers are quickly realizing, Grana notes, that they’ll lose momentum if they do business out of Las Vegas. “We have the space. We have great fiber connectivity. You can connect to your company or business in California or Texas or New York or wherever — it’s very convenient. And you can live here with a relatively lower cost of living.”