Help me find a place in Vegas

[evanski]

Im thinking about buying a second home in Vegas. Not only would it be useful for when I travel to Las Vegas, it will allow me to establish residency in Nevada and avoid state taxes. However, I know almost nothing about the geography of Las Vegas. Can someone familiar about Vegas give me a suggestion about what neighborhoods to look into keeping in mind the following criteria:

1. I want to be reasonably close to the strip. I plan on having a car so it doesnt need to be walking distance, but 15 minutes or less by car would be nice.

2. It needs to be safe. The house/condo will sit empty for a decent portion of the year.

3. Id like a fairly nice place. It doesnt have to be extravagant or anything, but nice.

I was sort of planning on getting a condo, but if you guys think a house would be better I can be talked out of it. Also, how much should I be looking to spend? Thanks in advance.

-Evan

[bav]

Might I recommend the likes of: http://www.macdonaldhighlands.com/re...ry/villabella/

Don't worry about security... I can house sit for you while you're away. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

More seriously, it's hard to know what you want. Safe and very near the strip are mostly mutually exclusive without spending lotsa bucks for a 24x7 guarded highrise condo. Of which there are many sprouting. Plan to start at $400Kish for like 600sqft and go up from there, though not proportional to square footage. You can get 1500sqft condos near the strip for ~$700K, though you can also spend probably $1.5M on 1500sqft, too; all depends whether you want Regency Towers sorta basic condo or Park Place sorta floofy condo.

Going further out, One Las Vegas condos (that's the name of the thing, ONE LV) are going up right now a few miles south on the strip. Except during rush hours, that's about 10 minutes from LVBlvd/Tropicana. And that's about far enough out to begin to think about houses and safe together. For about $400K you can have your basic 2400sqft, 4BR sorta house with a 0.1acre yard. Adjust up and down depending on home size, yard size, spiffiness, neighborhood and age.

Going a bit farther out you'll begin to reach the areas most folks will tell ya are most pleasant...Summerlin, Green Valley, or other parts of Henderson. But Summerlin and the more distant parts of Henderson are probably not within your 15-minute radius even if the lights are good and there's no traffic. As well, folks have previously suggested areas a few miles east of the strip around Boulder Highway as safe and affordable--that's outside my normal travels.

There are also a few spiffy condos sprouting around downtown if you like that sorta urban-renewal thing where they drop a tower full of $700K condos smack in the middle of a fairly blighted area surrounded by crack houses.

All just my uninformed opinions. I'm not a real estate agent, I don't invest in Vegas property, and I don't travel around window-shopping for houses and condos much. I just live here and these are the basic beliefs and biases I've absorbed.

[evanski]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Upon thinking about it more I think I want a house. If you were going to pick from the nice neighborhoods you listed, Summerlin, Green Valley, Henderson, which one would you want to live in and why?

-Evan

[Arbitrage]

[ QUOTE ]
Might I recommend the likes of: http://www.macdonaldhighlands.com/re...ry/villabella/

Don't worry about security... I can house sit for you while you're away. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

More seriously, it's hard to know what you want. Safe and very near the strip are mostly mutually exclusive without spending lotsa bucks for a 24x7 guarded highrise condo. Of which there are many sprouting. Plan to start at $400Kish for like 600sqft and go up from there, though not proportional to square footage. You can get 1500sqft condos near the strip for ~$700K, though you can also spend probably $1.5M on 1500sqft, too; all depends whether you want Regency Towers sorta basic condo or Park Place sorta floofy condo.

Going further out, One Las Vegas condos (that's the name of the thing, ONE LV) are going up right now a few miles south on the strip. Except during rush hours, that's about 10 minutes from LVBlvd/Tropicana. And that's about far enough out to begin to think about houses and safe together. For about $400K you can have your basic 2400sqft, 4BR sorta house with a 0.1acre yard. Adjust up and down depending on home size, yard size, spiffiness, neighborhood and age.

Going a bit farther out you'll begin to reach the areas most folks will tell ya are most pleasant...Summerlin, Green Valley, or other parts of Henderson. But Summerlin and the more distant parts of Henderson are probably not within your 15-minute radius even if the lights are good and there's no traffic. As well, folks have previously suggested areas a few miles east of the strip around Boulder Highway as safe and affordable--that's outside my normal travels.

There are also a few spiffy condos sprouting around downtown if you like that sorta urban-renewal thing where they drop a tower full of $700K condos smack in the middle of a fairly blighted area surrounded by crack houses.

All just my uninformed opinions. I'm not a real estate agent, I don't invest in Vegas property, and I don't travel around window-shopping for houses and condos much. I just live here and these are the basic beliefs and biases I've absorbed.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great post, I am also looking into LV RE and found this very helpful.

[bav]

[ QUOTE ]
If you were going to pick from the nice neighborhoods you listed, Summerlin, Green Valley, Henderson, which one would you want to live in and why?


[/ QUOTE ]

I do live in the SE near Maryland/Pebble. 2 years ago after having taken nearly every vacation to Vegas for the previous few years I decided to just plop down here fulltime. I had almost exactly the same thoughts as you--easy access to the strip was important, but being in a not-crappy neighborhood was higher priority. This is a couple miles from the Henderson/GV border and seems like a nice enough neighborhood. It's kinda between the McCarran runway X's so isn't in the normal arrival/departure flight paths of the 5th busiest airport in the country. Access to I-215 is trivial and that's generally my choice for how to get around generally letting me land on the strip in about 12 minutes if the lights and traffic cooperate, but I have many alternative routes to get me to the strip (head west to LVBlvd, head east to Eastern, use I-215 to I-15, use I-215 to the airport tunnel). Basically it seemed like it met all my criteria very well, and I have no buyer's remorse.

Northeast Vegas is mostly Nellis AFB so I just didn't even look there much.

Northwest Vegas and Summerlin are nice areas, but getting in and out is rough...the highways that lead that way are always THE most congested in the entire valley; as well, the identical house in Summerlin seems like it cost 15% more than that house almost anywhere else. After spending one hour to travel 3 miles on US95 one day I crossed it off the list completely.

Southwest areas look ok and I viewed a couple houses out there, but it seemed like 'bout the only way in/out was through Blue Diamond Rd, and that backs up enormously during rush hours (but is getting better as they work on it, and add more interchanges with other major N/S streets).

That left the southeast. Lots of established neighborhoods and lots of ways to get to it. Grocery stores and Walmarts aplenty, and I don't feel like I need an armed escort to go buy milk at 10pm.

I looked at houses further out in the SE in Henderson/GV but just didn't feel like I had to go that far to be comfy. And when I found this place on a cul-du-sac, close to I-215 but just far enough away, close to the airport ($15 cab ride) but quiet, it just all clicked.

Mind you, two years ago houses were in fairly short supply. This was just after the super-boom; during the boom the average lifespan of a house on the market was like 4 days and people were making 105% offers to try to snag houses they liked before they'd disappear. That had ended, but the supply was still limited. Now, there are LOTS of houses on the market and they stay on the market for weeks before selling. You won't have any trouble finding a house that suits you in about any neighborhood, and you can offer less than the list price and probably get it.

[pig4bill]

If I were looking for a house in the Vegas area, I would look for a vacant one with a for rent sign and lowball like crazy.

[Cactus Jack]

Yesterday, I passed by the Park 1 condos on W. Charleston, around the Durango area. They looked nice and had some special going. Not a bad area and easy to the Strip.

[bav]

[ QUOTE ]
If I were looking for a house in the Vegas area, I would look for a vacant one with a for rent sign and lowball like crazy.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wanna be my across-the-street neighbor? This describes that house exactly. Had a for-sale sign for a while, then filled with renters (and oddly enough, a couple weeks after the renters moved in the only incident of crime in the neighborhood since I moved in happened when someone tagged a utility box in my yard). They moved out and the forsale sign came back for a while. No joy, so renters came in again (during which time I received a phone call from a repo company offering me a reward if I'd call 'em and let them know the next time I saw a black Durango with a specific license plate, and every weekday at exactly 6:10AM an SUV would drive up and start honking constantly until the guy came out and got in). Now those renters are out and it's forsale again, and also has a forrent sign. Please... someone stable move in there. No more renters.

[*TT*]

I think I'll be in Vegas on Fri-Sun next week looking as well, my apartment deal fell through. I'm looking for urban living styled apartments, for example the deal that fell through was at the Soho Lofts. Can anyone advise a good strategy so I can see as many places as possible in three days? I assume brokers will show on weekends, I really don't know.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[pig4bill]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If I were looking for a house in the Vegas area, I would look for a vacant one with a for rent sign and lowball like crazy.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wanna be my across-the-street neighbor? This describes that house exactly. Had a for-sale sign for a while, then filled with renters (and oddly enough, a couple weeks after the renters moved in the only incident of crime in the neighborhood since I moved in happened when someone tagged a utility box in my yard). They moved out and the forsale sign came back for a while. No joy, so renters came in again (during which time I received a phone call from a repo company offering me a reward if I'd call 'em and let them know the next time I saw a black Durango with a specific license plate, and every weekday at exactly 6:10AM an SUV would drive up and start honking constantly until the guy came out and got in). Now those renters are out and it's forsale again, and also has a forrent sign. Please... someone stable move in there. No more renters.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now see? There's the perfect hookup. Someone knows the backstory on the house. It's probably a similar situation to a friend of mine that bought a house looking for a quick buck just as the boom was topping out. After a few months of making payments he realized prices weren't going up any more and he would be holding the house longer than he thought, so he started looking for renters. He's had about the same sort of luck as described above. He's not hurting financially, so he'll hang on for awhile. But a lot of others can't say the same and need to bail out.

When you find one of these, think of an insulting price and then lower it by another twenty grand. They might think you're a total jerk and throw your offer in the trash, or they might think you're the saviour they've been praying for.