Despite slowdown, LV home sales could set record

Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001 | 9:51 a.m.

New home sales in the Las Vegas area in September were down from last year, but sales for the year as a whole could still set a record, industry observers say.

Home Builders Research Inc.'s President Dennis Smith said builders sold 1,693 new homes in September, down 4.2 percent from September 2000. But builders have sold 16,473 homes so far this year, up 10 percent from the same January-through-September period a year ago.

Smith said builders are on a pace to sell about 21,000 homes this year. The previous record was in 1999, with 21,162 homes sold.

"It's going to be close" to a new record, he said.

The mixed news on home sales comes despite major layoffs, economic uncertainty and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast.

Monica Caruso, a spokeswoman for the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said a dip in the September numbers was expected.

"For September everybody was sort of home watching television and in a state of shock," she said. "America kind of came to a halt for two weeks. That's going to have an effect on everything."

Gauging the true state of the home-building and -selling industry, one of Nevada's most important, will take two or three months, she said. The association and other industry observers will watch home sales numbers from October and November carefully.

Smith and Caruso said one strong positive for builders locally and nationally are mortgage rates. The rates, depending on the lender, hover between 6 percent and 7 percent -- the lowest in about two decades.

Numbers for resales of existing homes also are strong. Clark County and the cities of the region had 2,555 sales of existing homes in September, up from 2,415 for September 2000.

And builders have applied for permits to build 1,856 homes in the area, Caruso said.

One negative in the still largely positive picture is in cancellations of orders for new housing. Historically, the cancellation rate has been about 20 percent for the area, Smith said.

The cancellation rate is around 30 percent now, he said. But the rate has dropped since the Sept. 11 attacks, which saw cancellation rates around 40 percent, he said.