Summerlin townhouse project sells out before breaking ground

A local developer has sold out a Summerlin townhome complex before it even started construction, another sign of Las Vegas’ accelerated housing market.

Edward Homes expects to break ground around Aug 1. on Thrive, along Charleston Boulevard less than a mile west of Red Rock Resort, and hopes to finish in the first quarter of 2023, owner Brock Metzka told the Review-Journal.

He originally planned to build it in phases, with model homes opening first, but his firm has already presold every unit, he said, adding that it took less than 90 days to find buyers for the homes.

“It was fast,” Metzka said.

Thrive is smaller than a typical housing tract in the valley, sitting on just 2.6 acres and planned for 43 homes. But its rapid sell-off — shown on Edward Homes’ website with a “SOLD OUT” bar across a rendering of the project — further underscores Southern Nevada’s heated market.

Fueled by cheap borrowing costs and more out-of-state buyers than usual, Las Vegas’ housing market has seen record-high prices and rapid sales for months. Sales dropped for a few months during the normally busy spring buying season, but overall, house hunters have flooded properties with offers and routinely paid over the asking price, and homebuilders have regularly raised prices, put buyers on waiting lists and taken bids for lots.

Thrive, at the southwest corner of Charleston Boulevard and Plaza Centre Drive, is near the 215 Beltway and the Downtown Summerlin open-air mall. Prices range from about $440,000 or $450,000 up to $550,000 for the three-story homes, Metzka said.

By comparison, the median sales price of newly built condos and townhomes in Southern Nevada in May was $309,618, Home Builders Research reported.

Metzka said that half of the units at Thrive are being sold to cash buyers, mostly from California, and that he is not worried about people canceling their purchase before construction finishes well over a year from now and the sales can close.

He indicated that some buyers canceled their sales at another project he has, and his firm sold the units for 10 percent more.

“I’m not worried about that at all,” he said.

Metzka also figures that a few years ago before the market went into overdrive, he could have sold maybe half of the units before breaking ground “but not the whole thing.”

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