Hey my brother is going to be buying a house in Vegas sometime in the 2009 spring/summer. I was wondering what areas are good to live in and what are ones to avoid.

Requirements -

Good area to live, aka not much crime/poor areas. I heard Spring Valley is nice, but are there any others?

Also (and more importantly) what are the areas to avoid? I know North Las Vegas is bad, but some realtor said that new North Las Vegas is okay. Is he lying just to try and sell him a house, or is he actually right? I know a place Henderson is okay but it doesn't seem like it's anything special. How much worse is new North Las Vegas than Henderson?

Closer to the strip the better but anything within a 30 (preferably 20 but 30 if we find a really sick house) minute drive is acceptable.

fwiw he is looking at something between 600k-1 mil with at least 4 bedrooms (preferably 5), 4+ bathrooms and a pool (although we might buy a house without a pool and just build one if we find a really sick house without one, how bad/good of an idea is building a pool?).

If someone can list the rich/well off, average, and areas to avoid on here it would be much appreciated. Any other comments/things I should know also would be nice.

Thanks

there's really no reason at all to live in North Las Vegas even if you find a pocket of it that's not terrible

if you draw a line from the northwest corner of the valley to the southeast and just eliminate everything northeast of that line you won't be missing much of anything interesting

Summerlin afaik

Big fan of the GVR/Henderson area. We've lived here since March and love it. It's 14 mins from driveway to the Wynn parking garage (and we're on the opposite part of town). The area feels like a 'normal' suburb and not like 'Vegas'. Everything we could want is w/i 5 mins drive. Very safe and secure area. Big big fans of the area.

my girlfriend lives in SW las vegas. off of jones, less than a minute from 215. i don't know a lot about houses in the area (she lives in a condo) but this has to be the cheapest area of town, as it's the most undeveloped. very nice though, in 5 years it will probably be excellent.

as many have said, don't bother looking anywhere east of the strip (i have an apt over there, breaking my lease after like 4 months, lol). north las vegas is good....FOR ME TO POOP ON!

def. i live in green valley and i can safely walk to blockbuster, trader joe's, sporting goods store, library, chili's, and post office any time day or night. there's also two banks and another shopping center with sammy's pizza, supercuts, joe's crab shack and a bunch of other stuff.

all that is only about a 5 minute walk

Any other areas which aren't green valley but are similar to it in Vegas? Cause I noticed Green Valley has a lot of older houses for sale, we kinda want a house that was built in the last 10 years.

the population of Henderson has grown by ~75k since the 2000 census. You can definitely find homes that are less than 10 years old. The southern part of Green Valley tends to be newer than the northern part

Summerlin on average is newer than Green Valley

the southwest has had most of the recent development (and it's where most of the valley's unused land is) and it's an acceptable area but nothing special

Green Valley is the ****

another area that might be similar is summerlin(not 100% sure but its close to it) near the rampart casino(summerlin pkwy and rampart), I know multiple poker players living in that area.

worst areas- anything near the strip and north of Sahara, also east of the strip between LV blvd and Maryland pkwy, north of UNLV seems to be a bit sketchy but nowhere near as bad as downtown.

Summerlin >> Green Valley/Henderson, but less bang for your purchasing dollar.

+1 for GVR/Henderson. Pretty much for the reasons SFC outlined.

Speaking of, seems like there are a lot of us out in this area. We should all get together for the next UFC or something.

i'm down. when is it?

OK thanks for the help guys, one more question.

Have any of u built or known someone who has built a pool in vegas? If so how decent of an idea is it? We are trying to get a house with a pool but if we find a house we really like that comes without one we are thinking of building our own.

Also if we find a house with a pool but the pool is too small, how easy is it to expand the pool? I assume it costs a decent amount less than building ur own pool right?

We are also planning on making it an indoor pool, so if it's already built we are planning on putting walls around it (nothing super fancy) with windows obv etc so that we can avoid bugs/swim year round/not worry about the rain even tho i'm sure it doesn't rain much. How decent/good of an idea is this? How much will building a pool/making it indoors cost?

fwiw i'm obviously not expecting exact numbers just a rough estimate. Also we are looking at something like a half olympic size pool with maybe a few designs but nothing super fancy.

I don't think that would be worth it unless you are really determined to swim all year round

rain and bugs are pretty much a non-issue

also you need to keep in mind that lot sizes are generally quite small and you are going to have very little room for the pool

Aren't there some monster houses in the southwest? I thought that's where a guy I know lives, and he has like a 6 car garage for his Astons and Jags.

yeah we kinda do want to swim year round, if we had an outdoor pool what months could we not swim in cause I have no clue how Vegas weather works.

It's practically too cold now brrrrr. 80 degree pool ftl :-). To think I used to jump into 60 degree lakes.

But there are lots of different heating options. My parents use solar heating for the pool and it saved them a ton of money when it comes to pool heating.

A pool is nice to have, but it's funny how much I haven't used it, other than to go stick my feet in it in the afternoons.

Oh, and another +1 for the South Las Vegas/Henderson area. My uncle just moved there and it's nice and that's where I'm planning on renting. My parents are off of Jones and there is some definite variance in neighborhoods there due to weird expansion. Part of the reason my uncle moved is because their neighborhood went from really nice to a drug zone (found used needles in the backyard). All the foreclosures are messing up neighborhoods.

also just in case this is causing any confusion - Green Valley is not really synonymous with Henderson. For casual conversation it doesn't make much difference, but technically Green Valley is just the area between (and adjacent to) Green Valley Pkwy and Valle Verde Dr. There are some other master-planned communities in Henderson along the mountainside such as Seven Hills, Anthem, and MacDonald Ranch which are very affluent that might interest you.

http://www.weather.com/weather/wxcli...nav_undeclared

you can draw your own conclusions from that as well as I can, and ofc some days will be much hotter than average (I think it once broke 100 in mid-March or something)

No house under 3M is going to have an indoor/outdoor pool. At least in summerlin, which is the area I know best. A pool like that is >100K. It is just not common as rain and bugs are a non-issue, it is not like florida where you see this everywhere. The only person putting this in is some baller with a BB court, racketball court, etc.

Putting in a decent sized pool costs anywhere from 30-80K. It is a pain in the ass to put in a pool. I would suggest in today's market just finding a house with a pool you like. Have you ever had a pool? Most people greatly overestimate how much they will use one. I love having one, I just am saying I think you are overestimating how much you will use one in december. Summerlin has a public pool being built that will be indoor/outdoor by the way.

If you like a pool really warm, June/july/august.
Solar cover or roof solar panels will extend this to May/sept.
April / Oct will be brisk.
The rest I would never get in.

You can of course heat the pool with a gas or electric heater anytime but it is mega-expensive. Maybe $100 to heat my old pool for 2 days in Dec with gas.

Get salt water. It's awesome! Also, pebbletech looks a lot nicer than plaster but can be rough on your feet.

I have a separate spa so I dont' have to wait until it heats up, my old house had a pool/spa but it sucked because you had to wait 45 minutes in Dec to heat up and keeping the temp steady is a pain.

Anything else you want to know about summerlin you can PM me - I'm not good at following threads. I know of some great places in that price range right now.

Growing up in northern Illinois, this little factoid shocks the hell out of me:

"The lowest recorded temperature was 8°F in 1963."

my personal experience is it doesn't matter much what the daytime high is - it is how cold the ground is at night that determines how hot the pool is. Even when it hits 95 in march it gets cool again at night.

I have solar and when we had a mini-heat wave this year in spring my pool only went up maybe 5 degrees and then cooled back at night.

yeah, I don't know the first thing about owning a pool. I can only comment on the weather.

Ok thanks for the help guys, I don't think we will want to just be able to use a pool for only 6-8 months out of the year so we will prob look hard to make it indoors as I won't be the only one using the pool (there will be 4-6 people living in the house, plus people we invite over will want to use it too etc).

The portion of North Las Vegas that's north of the 215 loop is perfectly fine, and the good portion can extend south of the 215 (between 95 and I-15) down to Ann Rd., maybe Craig in some spots, but... wouldn't dare go any further than that.

The main problem with the area is it's a bit of a hike to the Strip. Pretty much a 30 minute drive unless you're near where 95 and 215 cross.

Everyone loves Henderson and Summerlin, but I wouldn't sleep on portions of the southwest either. Rhodes Ranch (west of Durango by Windmill and Warm Springs) is really nice, ditto Mountains Edge down off Blue Diamond Rd., and just as quick of a drive to the Strip as from Henderson.