Ep#32 French Workbench- Best Places To Live In Las Vegas For Families & Builder Hot Spots

Las Vegas, dubbed the riskiest housing market in the nation less than a year ago by real estate analyst CoreLogic, is on track to price the working class out of the market by the end of the year, says Las Vegas Realtors president Aldo Martinez, and Wall Street is scrambling to scoop up the rentals would-be buyers will be forced to lease. The median price of a home — $385,000 — has increased more than 14 percent since CoreLogic deemed Las Vegas the riskiest market in America. The company did not respond to questions submitted by the Current. The median price of a single family home was $295,000 in August 2020. It’s increased $90,000 in less than a year. “By the end of year we’ll be well over a median of $400,000, outpricing the median wage earner who will no longer be able to afford a home,” says Martinez. “That’s what Wall Street is banking on — that they’ll have to rent and become tenants.” Martinez says investment companies such as Zillow and BlackRock are “buying up everything between $250,000 and $400,000 with some going as high as $450,000,” with the intention of turning them into rentals. It’s a new twist on the strategy made popular by investment firm Blackstone when it gobbled up properties after the Great Recession, leasing them through a company called Invitation Homes. “There is more institutional capital (Private equity funds such as Blackstone) flowing into such asset types now as opposed to mom and pop landlords, which were the traditional owners for such rentals,” Dr. Vivek Sah, director of UNLV’s Lied Real Estate Institute, said via email. “Such funds/institutions have a bigger appetite and hence have been purchasing in bulk especially in cities that have younger demographics and growing population (due to large in-migration like in LV MSA). Last week, Blackstone, the company that has been buying the land beneath MGM properties and leasing the operation back to the gaming company, announced it’s spending $6 billion to acquire a company that offers rent-to-own single family hom