Las Vegas Is the City Where Home Prices Are Falling the Most

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 28, 9:30AM EST

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Las Vegas Is the City Where Home Prices Are Falling the Most — © littleny / iStock via Getty Images

After a massive surge in home prices, which started early in the COVID-19 pandemic, high mortgage rates have slowed and, in some cases, reversed that advance. A recent study shows that Las Vegas has home prices that have started to slip the most among America’s large cities.
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Once a month, the S&P Case-Shiller home price index is released. The most recent edition covers the month of October. Nationwide, home prices dropped by 0.5% month over month. A negative move of this magnitude has rarely been posted in over two years. Year over year, prices continue to rise, up 9.2%, which is a slowdown compared to recent months. The number was closer to 20% earlier this year.
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Craig J. Lazzara, managing director at S&P DJI, commented, “October 2022 marked the fourth consecutive month of declining home prices in the U.S.” While Americans are not as mobile as they were early in the pandemic period, the primary culprit is mortgage rates, which were 3% for a 30-year fixed interest loan a year ago and have risen closer to 6% recently. This makes homes that were affordable for people with adequate incomes to make purchases not affordable at all.
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Las Vegas has been among America’s fastest-growing cities for decades. Home prices were shattered during the Great Recession, as prices collapsed and defaults and foreclosures surged. The city has made an impressive comeback since then. This was interrupted when the gaming industry was closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it rebounded once those businesses reopened.
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From September to October, home prices in Las Vegas fell 1.8%. The city with the next largest drop was San Francisco, at 1.7%. No cities posted price increases month over month. The city that did the best was New York, which fell only 0.2%.

It is too early to say if Las Vegas is the canary in the coal mine. If so, the downward reset in home prices will be the worst in over a decade.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.