Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit. James Scurlock D.
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between full-page glossy body shots of strippers, showcases nine of Beth’s shiny new trophies under a vivacious photo of herself and the headline “Passion.” Beth’s company, Prime Realty, operates out of a newish strip mall seven miles or so from the Strip, at the base of a series of hills that developers are carving into lots and selling at a mind-numbing pace. The road itself is still under development but already nurtures a series of familiar franchises and big-box stores. A constant dust storm is fed by a hundred construction sites, and cars bake in the sun, barely moving. The heat is oppressive. I wonder if a view of the Strip and the chance to see Barry Manilow five nights a week could really make it worth living here.
Luckily, Beth is as dynamic and charming as my producer promised. She’s middle-aged but seems far younger. The St. John’s pantsuit and gold jewelry practically scream “upscale Realtor” but I’m a sucker for her tomboyish bent and easy grin. As it turns out, she’s just moved into her new office, which she’s designed to feel like one of the “custom” homes she sells. Or so she says. It feels more like an upscale Marriott Hotel than a place to raise children or fart on the couch. It’s too clean. The surfaces are too hard and too polished, the fabrics too industrial, the colors too neutral. It’s the kind of place you can imagine yourself leaving the moment you enter. You know that the perfectly placed throw pillows and pashminas aren’t there for your comfort. You know better than to leave an impression anywhere.
Today is slow, meaning that Beth has time to talk. Her days are either feast or famine, she tells me. There is simply no knowing when buyers will suddenly outnumber sellers and vice versa. And this clues me into a simple truth. Her clients are not buying a home: They are investing in a home.5 Timing is everything. If they don’t call, this does not mean that they aren’t there: It means they are waiting on the sidelines for the right moment to reenter the game. While they wait, the number of Realtors grows. Beth knows that a lot of her competitors are trying to build their own businesses by outpromising her but she seems more annoyed than threatened. She can afford to relax a little. What she can’t do is get too comfortable.
Beth is, in her own words, “blessed.” Six years ago, a newly single mother of two little girls, she stumbled onto the opportunity of a lifetime. A national real estate developer had just bought several hundred acres of desert overlooking the Strip and was looking for sales agents. Beth got a job as a receptionist at the sales center, but her potential as a Realtor must have been obvious to the developer. Within six months she’d gotten her broker’s license and most of the listings in “Seven Hills,” a brand-new development meant to evoke the serenity of the Italian countryside.
Beth sold most of the lots in Seven Hills. Then, as Vegas real estate started heating up, she sold many of them again—this time with houses. As interest rates fell and property values rose, Beth noticed something very interesting: Her clients weren’t staying put, feeling smug they’d gotten in early and refinancing their mortgages at lower rates. They were selling and moving into bigger homes on bigger lots, sometimes in the same neighborhood. And they were making a killing. Prices in master plans like Seven Hills were skyrocketing. Developers couldn’t build new homes fast enough to meet demand, giving the homeowners a seductive taste of easy money. Many became speculators. And there was Beth, smack in the middle of a nationwide real estate boom that made the tech craze of the late nineties look like pocket change. And unlikely as it had to be, Las Vegas, with its scorching weather and monotonous landscape, was becoming the hottest real estate market in the country.
“What’s big in Las Vegas now,” Beth explains on a tour of Seven Hills’ larger units, “are home theaters, a wine room, elevators—because the homes are getting pretty darned big—two washers and two dryers, two dishwashers in the kitchen, huge kitchens.” In other words, what’s big in Vegas is bigness. When Beth started out, her clients were building 4,500-square-foot homes. Now a typical listing is 8,000 to 9,000 square feet. The largest home in Seven Hills is nearly twice that. “They’re just making them as big as they can,” Beth laughs. “And people want a gate. But more important, a gate with a guard. I had some wonderful lots for sale in Seven Hills that were clicker-gated. And people were, like, ‘But there’s no guard.’ What do you mean? The views are incredible! But people want the guard. I don’t know if it’s for prestige value or security, but people want that guard.” For the first time Beth sounds slightly exasperated.
Moving on, we exit the wrought-iron gates of Seven Hills. I am still wondering why it was named after, as Beth says, “someplace in Italy,” because none of the homes seemed remotely Italianate, and then there is the glaring absence of Vespas and Fiats, but whatever. We are headed to a newer development called MacDonald Highlands, an allusion to the lush rolling hills of my Scottish ancestors. Beth has scored her first listing at MacDonald: a $5.5 million spec home. Initially she wasn’t interested, but suddenly prices in the Highlands have surpassed those in Seven Hills. This makes no sense to Beth or probably to anyone else, either, save the speculators. They have jumped in again, but onto a different field.
The gate at MacDonald Highlands has a guard, which I now know is a major plus. He even has an official-looking badge and pants, though the stain on his shirt and the Taco Bell bag behind him probably won’t help Beth move real estate. There’s something very airport-security about the guy, but I’m guessing that airport screeners make more money. His only purpose seems to be opening the gate very quickly, which pretty much debunks Beth’s security theory—though, in his defense, we are white and in a big Mercedes. As Beth explains later, channeling Annette Bening’s character in American Beauty, it helps to drive what your clients drive.
There are no kilts or bagpipes at MacDonald Highlands, though it does seem to offer all of the amenities one would expect of a master-planned community. There’s the guard, of course, and a golf course, fresh pavement, themed street names, matching mailboxes, manicured lawns that look painted on the desert’s ubiquitous shade of ecru, and no doubt a laundry list of homeowner association rules (no garage sales, no pickup trucks parked outside, no “estate” sales, smarty-pants, etc.) that guarantee that everything will stay this perfect forever, or at least until you’re ready to trade up. As master plans go, it seems less cookie-cutter, more authentic even, though the Scottish name will gnaw at me a little, not least because the notion of two washers/dryers offends my ancestors’ thrifty sensibilities.
For the past twenty minutes I’ve been very curious to know what a spec house approaching six million bucks on the outskirts of Las Vegas looks like. As it turns out, the answer is a massive shoe box with huge windows and very little yard. Beth barely gives the exterior a glance before leading me past a massive oak door whose weight is, I have to admit, pretty impressive.
The home’s builder is a large man—Israeli, I think—who greets us in the spacious kitchen. He seems more than a little nervous. After all, nobody knows if the market has peaked. Homes are taking longer to sell. The big developers are offering incentives again—to buyers and agents. The word bubble is being tossed around at cocktail parties and has even appeared on the covers of respected business magazines. He needs to get this white elephant off of his hands, fast … Who knows how much interest he’s paying a bank every month it sits here, being big? Beth takes a yellow pad out of her bag and scans the Sub-Zero refrigerators and Viking stoves with a thoughtful eye.
Beth, I realize, has a great poker face. This drives the Israeli man nuts. He peppers her with questions, asking for some clues, but she won’t commit to anything: whether the asking price is too high, whether the market is overbought or oversold, whether she likes the house, even. All she promises is to take some notes, design a glossy brochure (Entertainer’s Dream! Sunny Delight! or some such Realtor euphemism), and wait for someone to bite. She turns the conversation to the home that she and her husband are building in Seven Hills. They had planned to do a concrete roof, she says, but the more she thinks about it, another $11,000 for the tile roof doesn’t sound so bad. She asks the builder for his opinion. He takes us out onto the patio and points upward. Rubber. It’s cheap, looks fine, and no one notices anyway.
Beth casts a thoughtful pose—she is a great listener—then leads me on a tour of the mansion, taking notes on the yellow pad as she points out the important features. There’s the home theater (good) and the view (pretty good) and