I tried to stay positive, but there are just too many problems in this town to ignore.

On some days, it feels like Nevada is two steps away from complete anarchy, which truth be told, would be a vast improvement over our horribly corrupt local and state governments.

Las Vegas is number one again.

Not just in fat people.

Not just in car thefts. (well, we are #2 but that is close enough)

But we also have the absolute worst housing market in the country.

Home prices tumbled by the steepest rate ever in May, according to a closely watched housing index released Tuesday, as the housing slump deepened nationwide.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city index dropped by 15.8 percent in May compared with a year ago, a record decline since its inception in 2000. The 10-city index plunged 16.9 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.

No city in the Case-Shiller 20-city index saw price gains in May, the second straight month that’s happened. The monthly indices have not recorded an overall home price increase in any month since August 2006.

Home values have fallen 18.4 percent since the 20-city index’s peak in July 2006.

Nine metropolitan cities “Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Wash., Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C.” posted record declines in May. And the value of housing in Detroit is now lower than it was in 2000.

But a possible bright spot in an otherwise dismal report, seven metros “Tampa, Fla., Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Dallas and Atlanta” showed smaller annual declines.

Las Vegas recorded the worst drop, with prices plunging 28.4 percent in the month. Miami came in a close second, with prices down 28.3 percent.

This is a very poor development for the Las Vegas housing market, and is a negative development for the Las Vegas Valley as a whole.

When I first move here, every “Real Estate Professional” I encountered tried to sell me a home. Repeatedly.

“You’re throwing your money away!”

“You’re making the landlord rich!”

“They aren’t making any more land!”

“Are you crazy, you HAVE to own a home!”

I stated my opposition to their theories several times, but I was repeatedly called cynical, paranoid, stubborn, and stupid.

Of course, this was nothing new. I have been called these things since I was about six years old, even by grown adults. I got shitty grades in school, and one of my elementary school teachers wrote (among other things) “Is too cynical and depressed for child his age” on my report card.

I got my head shoved through a wall for that. (Yes, yes, I can hear you applauding from here.)

When you are in 3rd grade, and spending your evenings holding your parent’s head up so they don’t choke on their own vomit after yet another overdose, when you can’t go to school for the 5th time in a month because your father punched you in the face while calling you a “useless piece of shit” or “fucking little bastard” (I swear I thought that was my name for awhile) … when you are too young for a job, and when your afternoons are spent finding ways to get money to feed yourself, solving “Encyclopedia Brown Mysteries” just doesn’t rate as a high priority.

Who cares if Bugs Meany stole the cookie from the cookie jar … I’m trying to solve the mystery of whether the guy upstairs is going to pay me the $10 he promised for running smack to the car parked across the street.

Yes, the “educators” thought I was stupid. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to know if Bugs Meany was the real culprit???

Only an anti-social prick, that’s who.

And let’s face it, anti-social pricks are not very bright. Bright people like happy things, and like to think happy thoughts.

Being the professionals that they were, the educators had a solution to my issue, though.

Their solution was to IQ test me to see just how stupid I was.

When I scored some rainman number on the test, they were puzzled. But, they figured it out.

Apparently, I wasn’t being “challenged enough”, and they bumped me up a grade. I realized at that point that “professionals” didn’t know their dick from a doorknob. I wasn’t being challenged enough???

I’m trying to feed my goddamn self after 3rd grade recess by running narcotics to grown adults, trying not to get knifed in the process, and I wasn’t being challenged enough?

Well fuck me.

When I still got bad grades (out of complete apathy and disinterest), they eventually just wrote me off as “lazy”.

Which may have been completely true, but at eight years old, I could still play “Little Wing” on my upstairs neighbor’s Strat when he nodded off after booting two spoons of china white … and the guy would always let me eat a can of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Soup which he always had stocked in the cabinet (I still love that stuff).

And that was really all that mattered to me at the time.

Not to mention that his girlfriend was a hooker who used to walk around naked constantly.

It wasn’t all bad.

Anyway …

My point is, the status-quo has always thought that I was an idiot. This is absolutely nothing new. Throw in depressed, paranoid and cynical for good measure. I didn’t coin the terms for myself, others did. Black people adopted the term “nigga” for themselves to remove the power of those words from those who used them, I simply did the same with what I was called. The names didn’t bother me then, and they don’t bother me now.

That’s why I love my hate mail box. You cocksuckers think you can say anything to me to hurt or concern me on any level? Really???

I quickly learned that absolutely nobody knows anything, and 99% of the things we are told on a daily basis are at worst a an outright lie, and at best … misleading.

However, in the last 8 years I learned something totally new. I learned to never mention that I didn’t own a home in mixed company, because I would have to endure a lecture from everyone around me.

Home “owners” scolded me (nobody really “owns” a home, you still have to pay rent to the government every year).

Real Estate agents laughed at me, taunted me, “educated” me, and assured me that in two years I would be very … no …. VERY VERY sorry because I could never, ever “buy at these prices again”.

These pleas and admonishments reached a crescendo circa mid-2006, when housing prices were starting to fall and agents started coming out of the woodwork more than they ever had before.

They assured me that I was lucky to be living in Las Vegas when there was a rare “housing correction”, and that now was the time to buy. I was supposed to buy during the “dip”. Only an idiot wouldn’t buy during the dip … and guess who that idiot was?

That’s right, the same guy who was the idiot since age 6.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

One particular agent (who was a very nice individual) was extremely persistent. I will call him “XXX”.

XXX decided to sit down, and explain to me in detail how BLM land auctions work in Las Vegas.

This explanation was the ace up his sleeve, so to speak. If I wasn’t convinced to buy property before, I would be convinced after the lecture.

You see, I could not figure it out myself. I was not a “Real Estate Professional”, and therefore, I could not form an educated opinion on the subject. Only “professionals” and “experts” can have truly educated opinions. That is certainly the position of the status-quo, and probably will be the position of the status-quo for the foreseeable future.

That’s why people pay $40,000+ /year to get “degrees”. So that people will assume they know shit. “Education” is a huge business, and credibility can always be bought.

Most people don’t learn a damn thing in college. It’s an expensive babysitting service for adults who simply don’t want to grow up. I have the “Girls Gone Wild” videos to prove it.

I will take the advice of a logical 8th grade dropout over someone with a doctorate degree any day of the week. I sincerely mean that. If someone tells me they are an “expert” or “professional”, I don’t walk away from them … I fucking RUN.

Degrees don’t prove that you know anything, they merely prove that you are willing to jump through hoops to convince people that you know something. It is my firm belief that, outside of a few specialized fields (like brain surgery) … formal education is a crutch for those with an otherwise lacking intellect.

Most people with a discernible IQ can learn what they need to learn in a fairly short amount of time with cheaply available resources (like books).

When I was 14, a local college asked me to write a program for their computer programming class. A class that I had never taken. A class that people paid a lot of money to take.  Apparently, the degreed teacher couldn’t write it.

What qualified me? I had obtained a low-end Radio Shack computer, bought a $12 programming book, and was writing my own shit in a week. I didn’t have any papers or documents to show that I knew how do it … but  why would I?  You can either do it, or you can’t.

What kind of moron takes “English” in college? What … are you a fucking Martian? Buy a goddamn dictionary … there I just saved you thousands of dollars. You’re welcome.

Group “education” in all forms is almost completely useless.  Learning is a highly individual thing, and if you need to pay someone to tell you to read chapters 3 & 4 by Friday, then you just aren’t motivated enough to learn it.

You can figure things out in life much more easily if you don’t use words like “professional” or “expert” as a crutch. Once you have labeled yourself as such, you have pretty much ceded your intellect to a label. I’m not saying that most people won’t do what you tell them because of the label, but it is a large reason why our population is so overtly stupid.

I guess nobody ever went broke playing on the stupidity of the masses.

Back to XXX ….

XXX told me, in depth, that most of the land in Clark County is owned by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), and that prices have to go up, because the BLM only auctions the land off sporadically.

He assured me that there was a land shortage, and that they “were not making any more land”.

The finite supply of land, according to him, meant that I should buy land, because any commodity in limited supply must go up. He explained the concepts of supply and demand to me at length.

I considered his theories, and despite his expertise, found them to not make sense. At least not to me.

Despite his explanations and advice, I was completely convinced that land and home prices would fall. I thought we were on the precipice of a complete implosion of the Las Vegas Real Estate market.

Okay, I can hear it now.

That’s right, I know exactly what you are thinking.

“Hey, Rex. Isn’t it easy to say that you were correct after the fact? I mean, anyone can say they predicted something after it happened and look like a genius. Aren’t you being a little disingenuous here?”

I would think the exact same thing if I read this on someone else’s site. I really would. Monday morning quarterbacking is far too easy, and how many analysts come out with “sell” ratings after a company declares bankruptcy?

Any idiot can start a website and claim that he/she knew something all along … after it has happened. That ploy is as old as media itself, and it is weak.

Rule #1 when reading any type of media - be it mainstream or alternative: Be skeptical.

I can’t stress how important this is. Whether it’s the New York Times, Review Journal, some local rag, or this site, don’t believe a goddamn thing just because you read it. People who write things are almost never “right” or “wrong”. It’s usually just a bunch of stuff that you need to decipher for yourself.

But what happens if the writer is being genuine?

It does happen at times. Sometimes people really did predict something and follow their convictions. They just sound like “that guy” … you know the one, the guy who says “I told you so” every time he is right, as if it is the first time he has ever been right in his life (and it probably is the first time).

I really don’t want to be “that guy”. That is why I struggle with articles like this. “Gee everyone, look at me, I was right!”

It’s fucking pathetic.

So what to do? Write it or don’t?

I figure people don’t have to read anything, and some people are actually interested in this shit, so what can it hurt? My credibility?

Hell, I am only 30% accurate as it is. It can’t get much worse.

To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t really matter.

What’s done is done, and none of it means anything anymore. Being right no longer matters. The information and opinions are also irrelevant.

But it is my goddamn article, and if I am going to post content, I at least try to make it my own. I could cut, paste, and link to other people’s articles and opinion pieces all day … but what would be the point?

Their content isn’t mine, and you don’t come here for me to tell you to go read someone else’s site.

I did not buy a house in Las Vegas, and do not plan on doing so for the foreseeable future. If asked for my personal opinion, I would recommend against it … unless you fully plan on using it as a long-term home. I think prices have further to drop, and I don’t think we will ever again see the inflation-adjusted prices that we saw in the early-mid 2000’s. Ever again. We will certainly see the prices again themselves, but not in relation to the dollar.

The only reason that housing prices are as high as they are now, is because of the complete implosion of the dollar.

That’s right, despite the drops in home prices, inflation is actually keeping housing prices artificially high. It takes more dollars now to buy $100,000 of 2006 value, than it did in 2006.

Therefore, if the dollar ever sees value again, and inflation is curbed, housing prices could conceivably plummet more as foreign investors pull out (which some are already doing), and as the Dollar to Real Estate ratio goes back up.

I am also thrilled that California and other out-of-town carpetbagger speculators got thrashed. It sounds mean, but I cannot help it.

For 10 years, non-locals made it prohibitively expensive for locals to buy homes. They came in, purchased 10 properties as “investments”, and priced out the cocktail waitress who merely wanted a home for her family.

Few, if any of these people planned to live in Las Vegas, yet they were buying up single family homes left and right … so that the average local could not afford them, because an out-of-town supply/demand imbalance was created.

If there is an unsympathetic group on the face of the earth that deserved to get fucked, it was the Las Vegas Real Estate Speculators.

They were ruthless. They were in control. They wanted you to rent, and they wanted huge applications, deposits, bank statements, background checks, credit checks, dick imprints, you name it.

They owned the town, and according to them, they were taking all the risk by renting to the lowly local.

I never bought into that. I have never provided a “application” to rent a place.

I always wondered aloud why people didn’t get credit checks, bank statements, and applications from the home owners from who they were renting. It puzzled me. I thought the whole process was completely backward.

They knew they were getting my money, how did I know I was getting a home for a year?

I take their word, but they don’t take mine?

I always assumed that I was taking an equal risk.

“Why do you always have to go against the grain?”, “Why do you rebel for no reason?”, “Why are you always so paranoid?”

As renters across the Valley are having homes foreclosed from underneath them when the owner defaults on the mortgage, and they are stuck with unrecoverable rent, security deposits, moving expenses, and major life disruptions … I believe that my critics have been answered.

Answers aren’t always expedient, but my paranoia is usually proven in time.

If you rent a single family home here … always request quid-pro-quo information. This is very important. If the landlord asks to see your bank statement, ask to see his. If they want to do a “credit check”, ask to see theirs. If they want to do a “background check”, as for theirs. Rapists and child molesters can own homes too … and they will have the key to your residence … but you don’t have one to their residence.

I have always maintained that the renter takes the majority of the risk in the landlord/tenant transaction, and that remains my position to this day.

It’s a business transaction which incurs risk from both parties, and the landlord is not doing you a fat fucking favor by allowing you to keep his ass out of foreclosure. Quit grovelling, and stand up for your damn self already. Say “I need proof that you are financially solvent to maintain the property for the duration of the lease.”

As far as buying …

If you plan to live in it for 20 years as your primary residence, purchasing probably makes sense.

Who cares what the value is, as long as you like your home, and can afford it.  Home prices are irrelevant if you can afford your payments, and you enjoy where you are.

I would not even think about buying anything in the middle of the desert as an “investment”. Sure, you might be able to flip it quickly and turn a profit in 3 years, then again, you might not.

We already have casinos here, why go through all of that to take the same risk? It’s not even as much fun.

And in order to truly make money, you need to make double digit increases every year.  Interest, taxes, closing costs, insurance, maintenance, HOA fees, and inflation all eat into rental and investment income.

When someone says “My house went up 50% in three years and I made a lot of money!”, I can’t help but look at them funny.

When you deduct the interest you paid over that time, the loan costs, the taxes, the inspections, the insurance, etc, etc  … and account for the devaluation of the dollar over three years, you didn’t make anywhere close to fucking 50%.

The average home price probably needs to go up by 10% or more per year just to break even on an intrinsic level.

So, what about XXX and my opinion on his “land shortage” theories?

What follows is the two year old email (dated July 4, 2006). I had no way of knowing what would happen then, but I had my own ideas.

Without a doubt other people have their own ideas, and will draw their own conclusions, but here it is:

Dear XXX,

You make some good points and you make them well. However, I still have to respectfully disagree.

Housing prices have been kept artificially high in Las Vegas ONLY by the BLM land auction manipulation of which you speak.

And the dirty little secret is that they have actually over-auctioned in the past few years.

If you drive south on Durango and take any street toward and south of Blue Diamond Road, you will see thousands upon thousands of acres of vacant land, not owned by the BLM … but by developers. Stop the car and get out to take a look at those little signs sticking out of the ground sometime. “Owned by Pulte”, “Owned by Centex”, etc, etc.

These developers have bought tons of vacant land, and are not developing on them now because housing prices are slipping. If at any time prices creep up again, do you know what will happen? BAM … new houses will spring up on those vacant acres practically overnight. The developers don’t want to build on that vacant land until everyone within earshot is convinced of the artificial and fictitious “land crunch”. It simply doesn’t exist. They could put up 20,000 new housing units tomorrow on existing vacant land that is already owned by the developers. But they don’t. Because that will cause prices to plunge since supply is already greater than demand right now.

Drive around the less developed areas sometime. Much of that land is not owned by the BLM, and even if it is, it probably won’t be in a few years. Developers have been gobbling up land left and right, and have squatted on it and prevented development for the sole purpose of propping up existing house values. And they, or the BLM could drop the hammer on it any time they feel like it.

There is just no land crunch in Las Vegas. It doesn’t exist. If anything, there is too much land. This is why getting roads built, water, sewage, and power lines extended is such a headache. This is why many people in the Southwest still have their own wells and have 2 acre horse farms 10 minutes from the strip.

We can absorb twice as many people as we have now, and still have more than enough land. Have you ever driven the road to Tonopah or Primm? We are smack in the middle of one of the largest unoccupied areas of the entire nation. There are no constraints like that in Manhattan or San Francisco. We can build 100 miles north and the only thing we would have to overcome is the stray wild burro here or there. Paying $500,000 for a house on .2 acres in this vast expanse of desert is really just wild-eyed speculation.

We have a complete and totally manipulated and artificial market here in Las Vegas. Tons of vacant land owned by an alphabet soup of people looking for a ripe time to dump it onto the market. Can people make money in it? Sure, assuming it is manipulated and marketed in the correct way. But it’s all fiat. The buyers have absolutely zero control over it. We could see a 40% drop overnight, and it would be completely warranted. In order for housing prices here to go up, the majority of people have to keep believing that the emperor has no clothes, because once they realize that fat man is naked, we could be in for a financial bloodbath here.

So, you have one camp calling this downtick a temporary “correction” which will reverse and go shoot back up shortly, and you have another camp declaring that Las Vegas is the most overvalued housing market in the country and that prices could easily fall as much as half.

Who is right? Nobody, because we really have no idea. Like most things, it will probably end up being something in between the two extremes.

However, in my personal opinion, there is no way that I would purchase anything in Las Vegas at the moment until that question shows some sign of being clarified. If I want to gamble, I will go to the casinos.

To me, it makes much more sense to “throw my money away” by letting someone else take the speculative gamble. I’ll pay half what a mortgage would cost to live in Las Vegas, and “throw away” the other half into the trashcan of a high-yield risk-free account … which will yield ever higher amounts as the Federal Reserve and mortgage companies increase their interest rates.

5 years from now, who will have more money, me or someone who buys a home in Vegas?

We don’t know, but I am comfortable with my decision.

Many canceled condo project developers would appear to agree with me.

Real Estate Agents will always say we are going up. Even if they knocked down all the casinos and shut off power to the entire Las Vegas Valley, agents would still be claiming that property values would be shooting up any day now. That’s their job. They have to do it. They are salespeople. They need people who believe them. 99% of all stock ratings are “Buys” and only 1% are “Sells”. This was especially true before the 70% Nasdaq dump of the early 2000’s.

You had every broker in the nation screaming “Buy, Buy, Buy, get in low, it’s a temporary dip, so get in cheap while you can!!!”. And every time it ticked lower, they screamed the same thing. And millions of people heeded the cry. And many people lost a good portion of their life savings.

The moral of the story is to never trust so called “experts”, “analysts”, “professionals” or whatever. They’ll say whatever sounds good, and unless they back up that advice with a money-back guarantee, you’re on your own. In the end it’s you who takes the repercussions of whatever happens. It’s you that has to deal with the reality. The broker won’t be there to help you out if they are wrong. The professional who told you to buy won’t take your call if you go upside-down. It’s all on the buyer. 100% on the buyer. And that screaming hype that you heard right before making the purchase won’t pay the bills. Heck, your agent will probably be at the foreclosure auction bidding on the property so their company can sell it to someone else at a “wonderful price”.

2006 is to Housing what 2001 was to Nasdaq, IMHO. There will be no shortage of people trying to convince you to catch a falling knife.

Housing in the middle of the desert is a lot like a stock. A quarter acre in the middle of hundreds of millions of acres has almost zero intrinsic value. And the BLM acts much like the Federal Reserve on stocks by extending and restricting housing supply. And the developers do the same.

It’s a heavily manipulated market with little actual intrinsic value, and hype and salesmanship is really all we have to keep prices at or above current levels.

I simply don’t know how long that can continue.

Very Best Regards,

Rex

To this day, the gentleman has never responded to me.

My guess is that he figured I had finally lost it, and I am wandering around Downtown somewhere with a tinfoil hat attached firmly to my head.

The truth is, I only do that on Wednesdays.

However, my position remains the same. There is not now, nor will there ever be a “land shortage” in Clark County.

Real Estate Agents will go batshit if you tell them this, but it’s completely true.

The sun will burn out before we can put 5 people on every .10 acres in this State.

And there is no reason to build vertically here, other than on The Strip. Unless you can find tons of people who are willing to shell out millions to say “I live in a hi-rise on the Las Vegas Strip!”, the whole market is doomed to failure.

Most people with that kind of cash stay in Bellagio Suites. Michael Jackson lived in the Mandalay Bay. Elvis lived on the top floor of the Las Vegas Hilton during his Vegas residency.  Most high rollers come here to stay in posh casinos, not in a frigging condo.

For those who don’t live or work here, there is little demand for a home permanently located on the ever-changing, sometimes moving, Las Vegas Strip.

I don’t think Las Vegas Real Estate will ever be again, what it was five years ago … but what do I know?

I’m clearly not a “Professional”.

Flame away.