How many homes are being built in Las Vegas right now?
New home construction in Clark County appears to be returning back to pre-pandemic levels, according to new statistics from residential construction data company Zonda.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, 9,600 single-family residences broke ground, a drop from other quarters over the last few years, according to Zonda, which tracks new home construction or starts. The peak for construction was in the first quarter of 2022 when work started on 13,229 homes.
Evan Forrest, a vice president with Zonda, said homebuilding in Clark County, and the rest of the country, is starting to level out after a few years of rapid activity during the pandemic fueled by historically low mortgage rates, remote work and more.
“It’s gone back to a little bit more of a normalization here,” he said. “We just hit such a low in some of our recent months here and now we’ve increased 15 percent in basically the last two quarters (to end 2023) in terms of how much annual (construction) starts have gone back up,” he said.
Residential construction starts were below 9,000 homes for each of the first three quarters of 2023, but Forrest said data moving forward into 2024 shows a return to more normal numbers of between 9,000 and 10,000 starts per quarter.
New build construction stats for all of Southern Nevada tell a similar picture and Amanda Moss, the senior director of government affairs for the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said in a previous interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a new equilibrium is emerging post-pandemic.
“This market is ever-changing and ‘not normal’ is our normal,” she said. “Since COVID, we have seen a relatively stable market of at or slightly above 11,000 permits (per year). Despite a much higher demand, skyrocketing population growth, and incredible economic development, given all our challenges, our industry is resilient.”
One area seeing a significant increase in the Las Vegas Valley is build-to-rent homes, as construction hit a 10-year high last year, according to a RentCafe study. Close to 500 units were completed last year, which was a 506 percent increase from 2022.
The RentCafe study noted that build-to-rent construction numbers have been increasing nationwide for the past five years.
“Las Vegas expanded its build-to-rent during the post-pandemic years twice as much than between 2014 and 2018, delivering new homes for rent for three years in a row,” the study said.“This led the metro to boast the eighth largest inventory of build-to-rent in the nation.”
A Construction Coverage study also found that between 2012 and 2022, Clark County’s housing stock increased by 12 percent, however its population grew an estimated 16 percent, while the median price for a single-family home shot up 236 percent. Clark County did have a larger percentage increase in terms of overall housing stock than the national average (8.5 percent), dating back to 2022.
U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that new residential construction is down from March up until April 16 of this year by 14.7 percent, however it is up 12.7 percent from February of this year. This is also a 4.3 percent drop from March of last year when 1.3 million homes were started across the country during that one month period.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.