LA fires could send residents flocking to nearby Las Vegas

The wildfires that torched thousands of homes around Los Angeles will send refugees across the desert to Las Vegas, putting pressure on its tight housing market.

That’s the conclusion of housing industry experts, who said it’s likely displaced Angelenos will flock to nearby Nevada in search of more affordable homes and apartments, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

“The data tells us the fire shocks the media, it’s all over the news, everyone is talking about it, even in neighboring states like here in Nevada, and the market starts to react,” Shawn McCoy, director and associate professor for the Lied Center for Real Estate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told the newspaper.

It was McCoy whose 2018 UNLV study looked at how severe wildfires in Colorado impacted real estate.

Los Angeles tops the list of migration into greater Las Vegas Valley, with nearly 158,000 people moving from California to Nevada from 2019 to the end of last year, making up 43 percent of all new residents to the state, the biggest out of any state in the nation, according to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles.

Those looking to relocate from the Golden State to the Silver State may not lessen their chances of losing homes to fires, but they’ll be more affordable, according to Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin.

“If people move from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, it won’t necessarily be for lower fire risk, but for better affordability,” she told the Review-Journal.

She said L.A. rents will likely rise, given that the housing stock has been depleted by the fires, and households that have lost their homes need places to live.

Some of these people will leave Los Angeles because they have been priced out, she said. And L.A. renters who can barely afford to rent a home in the market will also be priced out and move somewhere else, she said.

Fairweather said there will most likely be a “modest impact” on rental and home prices around Las Vegas because of the Los Angeles wildfires, with other regions also seeing an influx of residents.

Over the past week, wildfires, largely the Eaton and Palisades fires, have destroyed 12,000 structures and killed at least 24, according to news reports.

McCoy, a native of Las Vegas, said there could also be an impact on the local rental market, as displaced residents look for places to live. The wildfires may also discourage people who are considering moving to Los Angeles and push them to consider alternatives.

“We may certainly see the fires in L.A. place upward pressure on rent locally in Las Vegas,” he told the newspaper.

— Dana Bartholomew