Thank you for reading Friday Figures! All information from the GLVAR MLS system. This is critical data for anyone touring, making an offer, or listing a home in the Las Vegas Valley this weekend.

Summary: Available listings dropped slightly to 10763, while prices remain stable and time on market dropped slightly. The early bird is clearly catching the worm when it comes to the “best” listings — median time on market for homes sold in the last 30 days was just over a month. We also have 14958 contingent and pending units! Will we break through 15,000 next week? Will some of the 9400+ contingent short sales get approval and eventually close? Only time will tell. As it stands, only about 700 short sales per month are closing, so it will be a long time to get through all of them!

Other Information: There’s a lot of real estate news out this week, and a lot of it has to do with short sales. Remember, that’s when the mortgage company will be “short” money at the end. A lot of the current buzz is about the Treasury Department “program encouraging owners and banks” to do a short sale that begins next month. It is important to remember that this is a program, not a law or a regulation! I seriously question how many lenders will actually participate, particularly those who hold second mortgages. Meanwhile, we have very conflicting signals about future foreclosures. Remember, a lot of those short sales will eventually turn into foreclosures if nothing is done. On one hand, foreclosure activity declined 2% in February. On the other hand, the Washington Post estimates that there are 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 foreclosures waiting to happen nationwide. One last item, our local unemployment rate has risen to 13.8%. Wow.

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