Las Vegas builders start 2026 with sharp drop in home sales from year ago

Las Vegas’ homebuilding market is off to a slow start this year.

Sales and permits have tumbled from early-2025 levels in Southern Nevada — and prices ticked lower for the first time in a few years — as buyers face elevated borrowing costs and other economic headwinds. Some key aspects of the market recently saw month-to-month gains, but overall, business is down from the same period last year.

Builders logged 755 net home sales — newly signed sales contracts minus cancellations — in Southern Nevada in February, down 22 percent from the same month in 2025, according to a new report from Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research.

This marked the lowest February tally in a decade, the firm reported.

Also, builders fetched 790 net sales in January, down 19 percent from a year earlier, according to Home Builders Research, which noted this was the lowest first-month sales tally since 2017.

“World events are creating uncertainty in the economy, and housing is not immune,” the firm’s president, Andrew Smith, wrote in his latest report Friday.

According to Smith, homebuilders’ median closing price last month was $514,291, down 1.1 percent from February 2025 – the first year-to-year decrease since late 2023.

Buyers ‘on the fence’

Builders’ home sales and construction plans in Southern Nevada fell sharply last year. Collectively, their tally of closed sales dropped 20 percent from 2024, and the number of new-home permits they pulled also fell 20 percent, Smith previously reported.

This year, builders closed 664 home sales in February, up from 525 in January. But the combined two-month sum was down 28 percent from the same two-month stretch last year.

After a buyer signs a sales contract with a builder, it can take several months before construction of the house is finished and the sale closes.

Builders also pulled 721 new-home permits in February, up from 643 in January. But overall, the two-month total was down 27 percent from the same stretch last year, Home Builders Research found.

Across the U.S., builder confidence ticked higher this month, but affordability concerns keep weighing on the market, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

NAHB Chairman Bill Owens said in a recent news release that many buyers “remain on the fence” waiting for interest rates to slide down, while builders face elevated land, labor and construction costs.

He added that nearly two-thirds of builders are offering sales incentives.

‘All that’s in flux’

Low consumer confidence, affordability concerns, and elevated mortgage rates were constraining the “pool of actionable buyers,” Jeff Mezger, then-CEO of homebuilding giant KB Home, told analysts in December.

House hunters were showing interest in buying but were “just taking much longer” to decide, he said, according to a transcript of the call.

Locally, the job market has been “tepid” since the beginning of last year, according to Andrew Woods, director of UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research.

Southern Nevada relies heavily on visitors traveling here to spend big eating, drinking, gambling, partying and going to shows and conventions to fuel the local economy. Visitor totals, however, tumbled last year as fewer people took Vegas vacations.

As of December, Las Vegas’ jobless rate was 5.2 percent, second highest in the country among large metro areas, according to federal data.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-and-Israel war on Iran has rattled global economies, and Woods said he was keeping an eye on gas prices and inflation amid the fighting.

“All that’s in flux right now,” he said.