Prospective buyers hoping to buy a home for sale in Las Vegas may have to get used to living in a property controlled by a homeowners association, the Las Vegas Sun reports.
According to the newspaper, across Nevada there are an estimated 485,000 single-family homes covered by 3,000 associations. This is more than a third of all homes in the state.
In the 1980s, rather than joining a strict condo association, developers introduced the idea of communities run by a micro-government of homeowners – giving residents more control over their every day lives.
"I think at the beginning, people liked to live in them," former HOA assembly speaker Barbara Buckley told the Sun. "It was the idea of having something exclusive. You could control visitors, keep property value up."
While it was significantly more expensive to join these groups at the housing market's peak, since the housing market collapse, entry-level home buyers have been able to get into these properties at bargain prices. The most recent Standard $ Poor's/Case-Shiller Home Prices Index found that home prices in the city fell 8.8 percent in December alone on an annual basis.
