Las Vegas: Median home prices have biggest jump in 9 years

I still have my real estate license here in Nevada and I've been watching the market steadily improve over the past two years.

I hope more of this news gets out, as many buyers still come to the market thinking we're giving homes away for a dollar fifty.  Inventory is low and prices are rising. 

From Vegas Inc.:

Southern Nevada’s housing market began 2013 with mixed results last month, with rising prices, shrinking inventory and an uptick in nondistressed sales.

The median price of single-family homes sold in the region in January was $150,000, an increase of only 0.7 percent from December. But it was up 27 percent from a year ago, marking the largest year-over-year jump since at least 2004, according to a report out Friday from the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.

For the first time in years, “traditional” sales between a buyer and seller, with no lender calling the shots, accounted for more than half of all deals last month. Short sales, in which lenders agree to sell a home for less than what’s owed on the mortgage, accounted for 36 percent of the deals in January. That was down from December’s record-setting 46 percent but still up from 28 percent a year ago.

Additionally, sales of bank-owned homes comprised 12.5 percent of the month’s deals. That was up from 9.5 percent in December but down from 45.5 percent last January.

In addition to all that, at the end of this year the Mortgage Relief Forgiveness Act will expire making the "forgiven" part of a short sale taxable again. That will cause a lot of short sales to dry up, in my opinion.