real estate:

More ugly news for Nevada on foreclosures, home prices

The grim reality of real estate in Southern Nevada.

Two more real estate reports, another blast of bad news for the Nevada market.

Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac, of Irvine, Calif., issued national statistics for October and, as usual, Nevada had the nation’s highest foreclosure rate.

RealtyTrac said foreclosures were filed on one of every 180 Nevada housing units in October, while the national rate was one in every 563 units.

Nevada led the nation despite a 34 percent month-to-month decline in filings in the state, a situation analysts called temporary. They attributed it to banks adjusting to a new state law requiring foreclosing lenders to sign and record in public records an affidavit with key information about each foreclosure, RealtyTrac said.

The 1,201 new defaults in Nevada in October was the lowest since June 2006, RealtyTrac said.

Las Vegas, after 22 consecutive months posting the nation’s highest foreclosure rate among cities with populations of 200,000 or more, came in at No. 5 in October. Analysts chalked up the fall in the rankings to a temporary decline in foreclosure filings stemming from the new law.

One in every 162 housing units in Las Vegas received a filing in October, still more than three times the national average.

Leading the nation in foreclosure filings in October among the larger metro areas was Stockton, Calif., with a filing for every 143 housing units.

RealtyTrac said that despite the Nevada slowdown, foreclosure activity had picked up nationwide as banks started coming “out of the rain delay we’ve been in for the past year as lenders corrected foreclosure paperwork and processing problems.”

“However, recent state court rulings and new state laws keep changing the rules of the foreclosure game on the fly, creating more uncertainty in the housing market and threatening to prolong the road to a robust real estate recovery,” RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio said in a statement.

Separately, the Fiserv Case-Shiller Indexes were released Wednesday on home price trends in Las Vegas and hundreds more metro areas.

The latest Case-Shiller numbers for the Las Vegas metro area show that after local home prices fell on average 6.2 percent from the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2011, they’re expected to fall 15.9 percent between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012.

That compares with a national projected price decline of 3.6 percent between the second quarters of 2011 and 2012.

The problems in the Las Vegas housing market have been well documented.

In a nutshell, the nation’s most overheated housing market became its hardest hit during the recession due to a confluence of factors, including many homeowners becoming unable to pay mortgages they never should have qualified for and unemployment soaring to unheard of levels locally, currently 13.6 percent.

Unemployment jumped when Las Vegas was hit with the triple whammy of tourism and convention travel to the city declining during the recession, residential construction grinding to a near standstill and commercial construction similarly declining with the halting of work on big projects, including the Echelon and Fontainebleau resorts.

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