Good morning and thanks for joining me for Friday Figures! All information from the GLVAR MLS system. It’s what you and your Realtor need to know when touring, making offers, or listing property this weekend.

Summary: The number of available listings continues to slowly drop, this week to 12103. Still, inventory is down over 40% from 6 months ago. The decline in available bank owned properties is even more striking, over 60%. To be perfectly clear, this is not because banks are taking property off the market; they are selling it as fast as they can. Contingent and pending listings remain over 14,000, although over half are short sales at risk of going back on the market. Sales continue to close at a typical level of about 800 per week. Final median sales prices (and the listing prices of those properties) continue to be in a range between roughly $121,000 and $127,000.

Other Information: It is no secret that Nevada is currently experiencing record unemployment levels. This is contributing to enduring high levels of foreclosure actions (remember, this 1 in 56 number they cite is everything from the initial Notice of Default up to bank owned). It is not known whether the $25 million grant for our schools will create any jobs (teaching assistants, perhaps?).  An important test of our new foreclosure mediation law is coming up in a few weeks. I will be interested in seeing if it in fact works out according to plan, or whether the banks will fall back on tired canards like “the investors won’t let us” and “we’re federally regulated and don’t have to answer to Nevada authorities.” If you are considering mediating your foreclosure in Nevada, remember that you don’t have to have an attorney, but there are circumstances where it could help.

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