Home listings tumble in Las Vegas, U.S. amid coronavirus crisis

Homeowners are listing fewer properties for sale locally and nationally as the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the economy, new reports show.

The number of U.S. homes that hit the market around this past weekend was down 19 percent from the tally of listings that arrived around March 1, listing site Zillow reported Thursday.

The decline — at a time when the normally busy spring selling season is about to kick off — is a sharp reversal from the prior two years, when the tally of new listings jumped an average of almost 50 percent in that period, Zillow said.

“Our understanding of U.S. economic conditions is changing weekly, if not daily, and early unemployment figures are striking, so it’s understandable that some are hesitant to put their home on the market,” Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow, said in a news release.

In Southern Nevada, homeowners put 3,605 single-family houses up for sale last month, down 18 percent from March 2019, according to trade association Las Vegas Realtors, or LVR, which pulls data from its listing service.

Overall, the pipeline of sales is shrinking in Southern Nevada as the pandemic wreaks havoc on the economy with widespread business closures.

According to LVR, around 2,540 home sales were canceled last month, up 94 percent from March 2019, and buyers signed 3,175 sales contracts, down 24 percent.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.