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John Gittelsohn writes for Bloomberg that wealthy
folks are bailing out of Vegas.
“You feel like a sucker if you’re paying a $5 million
mortgage on a house that’s worth $2 million,” Zanganeh,
28, said while showing the grounds of an 11-acre Las Vegas estate built by
Prince Jefri Bolkiah,
brother of the Sultan of Brunei.
“These days, there are no traditional sales. They’re all short
sales or bank-owned.”
Well, I know of one traditional sale currently in escrow.
Eric Petersen, who owned Consumer Credit Services Inc., a Las
Vegas-based catalog-merchandising company that closed in 2008, says, “I
gave up on Vegas. There’s no opportunity for anything in this town that
I can see.”
According to Corelogic Inc., 70% of Las
Vegas homeowners are underwater and a January report by the Realtors Association,
claims 23 percent of delinquent borrowers in Nevada said they
“strategically defaulted,” or walked
away from their homes by choice rather than necessity.
During the 1990′s and up until the real estate crash, 200 people
a day moved to greater Las Vegas. Now, Clark County’s population has fallen by about 16,000 from its estimated high
of 1.97 million in 2008, according to the government-funded Nevada State Demographer.
The 2010 Census reported nearly 15 percent of homes in the county
— 125,000 residences — to be vacant, but locals have the number
at 66,000, including apartment units.
“We’re going to make lemonade out of this
‘crisis’ by promoting our foreclosures here,” says current
Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman.
But how many will come to drink?
Doug French
Mises.org
Douglas French is president
of the Mises Institute and author of Early Speculative Bubbles &
Increases in the Money Supply. See his tribute to Murray Rothbard.
Article originally published
on www.Mises.org. By authorization of the
author
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