Sin City's other Main Industry: Land!

The dirt business continued to improve in Southern Nevada in 2016 with Colliers reporting "The fourth quarter of 2016 turned in a surprisingly strong performance in terms of land sales in Southern Nevada, improving on the third quarter and making 2016 as a whole the strongest year for land sales in five years."

The average price per acre was down but that was due to a number of sales at APEX (northeast of Las Vegas) where just short of 930 acres was sold for 70 cents a square foot.  Meanwhile home builders are buying dirt where they can, with 354 acres selling in Q4 2016 for over $290,000 and acre.

Eli Segall writes for the LVRJ,

All told, developers are buying land and building again – but they’re not paying jaw-dropping sums for dirt like they did in the boom years.

Stater says land is selling primarily to people who plan to develop projects, not to flippers, an all-too-common scenario during the bubble era when easy money was sloshing around.

“The banks are not handing money out like they used to,” he said.

The Las Vegas land numbers (price and volume)  pale compared to the boom years of the post 9/11 Fed induced bubble. However, interest rates are still low, and as Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins once said, "God ain't makin' no more dirt, but he is still makin' babies. Stay tuned.