Welcome to the bottom: Part Five - Final

Excerpts from an article by Adrian Sainz, David Twiddy, Daniel Wagner, Alex Veiga, AP

The West

For years Las Vegas symbolized the boom, as mile after mile of desert gave way to three-bedroom homes and swimming pools. Then came the crash and it symbolized something else: a decade of speculation and excess.

Now, Las Vegas is one of the hottest housing markets in the region again. This city has always profited from others' misfortune, and the same can be said of the current housing market.
In Clark County, Nev., home to Sin City, one in every 11 homes had received at least one foreclosure-related notice in June, according to RealtyTrac. The glut of deeply discounted foreclosures has almost doubled sales activity for most of this year.

"In January the market was busy, and since that time, it's gone a little haywire," says Brad Snyder, an agent with ZipRealty in Las Vegas. "There's (sales) activity now that we haven't seen even since '04."

The situation is similar in California's Riverside, San Joaquin and San Bernardino counties, where one out of every 14 homes was in foreclosure.

After falling 18% in the second half of 2008, monthly home prices were flat in the first half of this year, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Markets like these have seen a surge this year in all-cash buyers, many of them investors, scooping up the sharply discounted properties. It's not uncommon to see multiple offers on a single property, and that's helped slow the rate of price declines a little. The demand also has helped whittle down the inventory of homes for sale to the lowest level since the boom.

"We have seen such a steep decline in supply right now, that when a home comes on the market it's first day there could be seven or eight or 10 people there in a matter of hours," Snyder says.
To lure buyers away from foreclosures, homebuilders have slashed prices or are simply tearing down vacant homes. New-home sales jumped almost 59% in the first half of the year, while construction in these grossly overbuilt markets slid 12%.

In the Pacific Northwest and states such as Utah, by contrast, housing markets are on a different timer than the rest of the West. Home sales and values held up better and longer while markets in the Southwest were already in decline. These markets also haven't seen as many foreclosures wreaking havoc with home prices.

States in the region: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming

Data compares June vs. January and June 2008:

• Home resales: down 1%, up 12 percent
• Median price: $214,800, flat, down 25 percent
• New-home sales: up 59%, down 10 percent
• New home construction: down 12%, down 42 percent
• Mortgage delinquencies as of March: 12 percent

Regional outlook: The recession remains the region's wild card. Unemployment is at 10.2% in the West, but that could go higher if the economy worsens. If that happens, expect more foreclosures and a slower turnaround.