Nevada Real Estate >> Las Vegas Real Estate Specialist: Nevada: Henderson: Green Valley

Skip the Strip is my ongoing series about events, tours and places to see off the beaten path when you visit Las Vegas!

Skip the Strip:  Tour Zappos

Zappos offers tours of their Henderson campus Monday-Thursday.  You usually need to book your tour one to three weeks ahead of time so planning is essential!  They offer shuttle service once you get the confirmation email of your tour you can book your shuttle service.

Zappos is an online retailer that started out in a small office as an online shoe retailer in San Francisco in the late 1990′s and relocated to the Las Vegas Area due to Nevada’s corporate & employer friendly environment.  They have since branched out from selling shoes to clothing, accessories and household items.

Zappos is known to be a very unique employer and allows flexibility with their employees to be unique individuals.  Desks and workspaces are adorned with individual taste.  I saw desks decked out with pink flamingos to desks completely wrapped in tin foil.  Name plates are “license plates” and tags show how many years the employee has been with the company.  Individuals employed less than one year have an “in-transit” tag.

In a day and age when many customer service call & online chat centers are outsourced to different countries – it is so refreshing to see one thriving here in the United States and in my own area!

The premise behind their customer service is really basic – just to give their customers the best possible service.  Their employees are not on commission and they are not trained to focus on the sale of the product.  They are trained simply to answer their caller’s questions.  Their longest phone call was between 8-8 1/2 hours (can’t remember exact minutes.)

Benefits are unique and the energy at the Henderson Zappos campus is awesome!  Tour guests are greeted with noisemakers everytime they enter a new section of the facility.  Even if you cannot make it to the Las Vegas or Kentucky area to tour this unique business – I do want to encourage people to patronize Zappos and purchase their online goods.  Our economy isn’t well in the Las Vegas area and employers who believe in hiring within the United States for tasks that can be outsourced to other countries for cheaper deserve our business!

copyright 2006-2011 Renee Burrows, REALTOR®, The Force Realty  702-966-2494

Blog Disclaimer Important Notice

 

              

     

         

 

 

 

 

This is Part 1 of the Las Vegas First Time Home Buyer’s Guide.  You can read the rest of the series here.

copyright 2006-2011 Renee Burrows, REALTOR®, The Force Realty  702-966-2494

Blog Disclaimer Important Notice

 

              

     

         

 

 

 

 

The sometimes shell-shocked players in the mortgage industry are continuously scrambling to meet the exceptional challenges they face almost daily. Seemingly, not a week goes by without one of the major home loan organizations - government or private - announcing a new policy it deems necessary to better handle the real estate market's peaks and valleys. Lately it has been more valleys - the ones that ruin weekends - than the other kind.

Fannie Mae is now updating its rules on borrower eligibility after he has undergone a pre-foreclosure process, usually meaning a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, a pre-foreclosure sale or then a short sale.The waiting period required before an applicant will again be eligible for a new mortgage currently is four years in deed-in-lieu of foreclosure cases and two years for pre-foreclosure sales. Short sales aren't presently governed by a set policy.

The waiting period is amended in this round of changes. It starts when the pre-foreclosure procedure is closed and will rely heavily on the LTV, or loan-to-value, ratio. A mortgage applicant with a LTV up to 80% will have to twiddle his thumbs for two years before being good to go for a new one. LTV reaching up to 90% freezes eligibility for four years and for LTV above 90% the wait could stretch out to seven years. Obviously Fannie Mae figured that when mortgage borrowers put, say, 20% down, it's worth risk-wise to allow them to become homeowners again after a 2-year sabbatical.  Following the same train of thought, if someone plunked down 40%, he should be eligible for a new loan immediately. Anyone who has that much money in play would be a nearly risk-free mortgage borrower.

The other factors weighing on the length of the waiting period are the occupancy status, owner-occupancy winning here hands down, and whether extenuating circumstances were involved in the mortgage recipient's failure to make his payments, resulting in the pre-foreclosure process. For instance, if an applicant can prove his hardship was due to a loss of a job, considered an extenuating circumstance, as a 90% maximum LTV borrower his wait would be only two years.

Modifying the policy on restoring credit after the pre-foreclosure procedure was also on Fannie Mae's agenda. These changes will add clarity to what type of mortgages the agency will accept from those with a pre-foreclosure case on their record. A sizable down payment will allow an aspiring home loan candidate to escape the doghouse in a mere two years. Money talks.

Southern Nevada - including communities like Anthem, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Mountains Edge, Summerlin, Southern Highlands, Green Valley and Rhodes Ranch - housing market has become one of the favorite playing grounds for scores of investors. And for a good reason. Las Vegas property values have nose-dived to roughly the levels seen here about ten years ago, a time when they were deservedly called affordable. Now, as was the case then, a nice single-family, 3-bedroom house in a solid neighborhood can be bought for under $150,000.

This Las Vegas housing drift has definitely drawn the attention of real estate investors from all over.So much so that they purchased a serious 41.2% of homes for sale here in October, as was reported by MDA DataQuick, a San Diego real estate information boutique. They generally use cash to do that, giving them an advantage over those who need mortgage financing for the deal. Who can argue against a quick close? In essence they mostly are deep-pocketed entities with a well-designed plan. They also realize that flipping is a thing of the past, so the properties are usually rented out for the long-term.

And that's where some Southern Nevada homeowners can get a bit emotional. This applies especially to the newer Las Vegas developments where mortgage foreclosures tend to be higher and where prices have been subjected to a thorough flogging. Existing homeowners see houses around them going for half the price they paid for theirs a few years ago. That can make anyone call Alan Greenspan bad names. To make matters worse many of these homes are now being turned into rentals and that can be considered undesirable for a neighborhood. One or two of them here and there isn't a problem, but if 20 or 30% of the area is rentals, yes, it can change the dynamic to a point where the values will further deteriorate.

On the brighter side, real estate investor activity will remove from the inventory countless vacant homes that mortgage lenders tend to let go into disrepair after foreclosing on them. Banks are known by most accounts to be rather lousy property managers. Therefore, it often is better to have someone occupying a home than no one at all.

Las Vegas real estate has recently been the punching bag of many industry observers and for a good reason. Mortgage foreclosure rate here is still reaching for the moon, housing inventory remains high and the economic picture is painted in dark colors. True, mortgage rates are enticing and home prices have plunged and have together provided some hope, but a lot more needs to happen for it to reach the "normal".

What's encouraging is that the vital signs are slowly improving, with emphasis on the word slowly.

As was reported by GLVAR, or Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, 3,535 single-family houses were closed in October, logging a nice 5.3% boost from September. This actually translates into a 30.1% jump from a year ago, a strong show of progress. As a note of caution is the fact that much of the demand still comes from first-time buyers and opportunistic investors. They are almost exclusively feasting on the lower end of the price scale.

Southern Nevada - including Mountains Edge, Anthem, Green Valley, North Las Vegas and Southern Highlands - median home values labored higher to $139,100, a $1,100 advantage over September. It's not much but Sin City gladly takes anything at this point. The price curve is in essence trying to establish some kind of a steady course upward, taking one small step at a time. On the sobering side, it is still down 26.8% from last year.

The housing inventory in Las Vegas continues to hover above the psychologically important barrier of 20,000. In October it in fact grew a little, to 20,998, amounting to an about 1% rise. As GLVAR states, a large share of this is pending a sale in some form, which is good, leaving only 8,000 or so listings without a contract. Nevertheless, this statistic has remained stubbornly high for months on end and needs to come down for a chance to spawn a sustainable recovery.

The word optimism is slowly returning to the vocabulary of many Southern Nevada real estate observers. Much more needs to be done but it's good get a taste of it anyway.