until a couple months ago, I was in a vanpool with a new home sales person. He told me that his new homes (Denver metro area) were selling quickly starting late last summer, and still were. According to him, many of his buyers had attempted to buy existing homes but were consistently being beat out by investors paying cash. I suppose the investors are renting out the homes until prices rise.
My Vegas realtor says the same thing. She primarily has two type of buyers,investor like myself that are mostly paying cash and FHA buyers.
So many of the sales in Vegas, and other distressed markets, are short sales and bank owned properties, that cash buyers are preferred in most cases.
Prices are appreciating enough that bank appraiser are fairly consistently appraising house below the purchase price. None if which would be a problem except for a ton of buyers are once again buying with no money down. So if the put in an offer for $100,000 and the appraisal comes up for $97,000 they have no money to make up the difference.
FHA, USDA, and VA all allow 0-3% down with the seller buying closing costs, i.e. points so the buyer can buy with no money down.
The truly frightening thing to me is that almost all of her buyers, as well as the people that bought my Mom's house, defaulted on their mortgages between 2007-2009. So here they are in 2013, with lousy credit scores, and they are able to buy houses with mortgage guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie (aka the US taxpayers.)
So rather than competing with with buyers like myself for any of the boatload of lightly used 5-10 year old houses in Las Vegas. They are buying new houses, the newish house in Vegas are $70-90 square foot and generally have established neighborhoods. The new houses are running $100-$120 square foot and really are not any nicer.
Now the buyers are having to pay 1.35% AFAIK, mortgage insurance, and do believe the days of the liar loans are mostly behind us. None the less it is seems crazy that once again the government is enabling and encouraging people who have past history of not paying their debts,and haven't been able to save money even 5-$10,000 over the last 5 years to overpay for houses.