Las Vegas: same house, five years apart, two different lives
No metro punished 2006 and rewarded 2011 quite like Las Vegas.
Bought 2006, today1.5×Bought 2011, today3.7×Same housedifferent decade
Purchases in 2006 and 2011 faced very different prices in the same metro. Picture the same house bought twice, once in each year. By the FHFA index, the 2006 buyer’s purchase stands at 1.5× today. The 2011 buyer bought into a metro everyone had written off, from a seller who’d had enough, and is at 3.7×.
Every argument about “houses always go up” and every argument about “housing is a bubble” is really an argument about which of these two people you would have been. Most of us would have been the 2006 buyer, because confidence peaks with prices.
House figures are estimates for the whole metro market, from the FHFA index. Not financial advice.