Top Prices For Las Vegas High Rise Condos in 2011

Recent articles in the Las Vegas Review Journal taunted that the high rise prices have "tumbled", we don't believe they will continue to "tumble".While we agree that high rise prices did tumble last year, we found that opinion to be the sort of short sighted view of someone who is looking in the rear view mirror rather than the road ahead.  Yes, we have seen some incredible deals in the high rise market.  Our happy clients are now owners of many of the lowest prices paid in several buildings.  I am quite certain that you want find a 1 bedroom Southeast corner unit above the 45th floor of Trump for $300K again, for example.  If it were listed for that price a bidding war would quickly drive the price up closer to $400K, or maybe a bit higher.

In looking at the top five closing prices in the MLS over the past year, we find the highest price paid for a luxury penthouse was $3,750,000 for a 4903 sf suite on the 9th floor of Park Towers.

Next SOLD price in the MLS was a 2998 sf unit on the 32nd floor of the Mandarin Oriental.  This was a new condo and at $1012/sf, it would qualify as the most expensive price per square foot.

The third spot in the top five was a 6104 sf penthouse on the 41st floor of Turnberry Towers which was listed for $3.2M and sold for $2.4M.

The final two in our top five high rise transactions for 2011 was a tie.  A 5142 sf, 4 bedroom suite on the 12th floor at Park Towers closed for $2M.  And a 5844 sf, 3 bedroom suite on the 15th floor of ONE Queensridge Place closed for $2M.  At $389/sf and $342/sf respectively, Park Towers still takes the fourth place position.

As the RJ's article correctly discussed, you would be hard pressed to replace any of these properties for less than $450/sf, which does make even the most expensive high rise sales a bargain.  Our inventory of high rise condos is shrinking.  We've seen some of the popular, smaller buildings like SOHO & Newport with very few listings.  We've actually had a couple of units come on the market at SOHO this past week.  At $219K for 1356sf on the 11th floor, these are not the bargain basement prices that investors have been snapping up at SOHO, but at $162/sf they're still a fraction of what they sold for when the building was new.  Yes, 2011 may have seen prices in the high rise market "tumble", and the gloom an doom may help sell papers, but we see this as the year of the turnaround for the moderately priced units.  For the larger, luxury penthouse suites, we still see some downward price pressure.  Only five units sold for $2M or above last year and there are 30 units listed for that price - at last year's rate of sale that is a 6 year supply of the high priced inventory, especially for the 7 that are listed for more than $5 mil.

With shrinking resale inventory available in most of the high rise buildings, we see this as the year when our favorite buildings like Turnberry Towers, the Martin, ONE Queensridge Place, CityCenter and smaller communities like the ModernLV and Mira Villa start finding their niche in the market.