Most people underwriting a Las Vegas rental start with the price and work outward. That's backwards, and it's expensive.
Everything below killed a deal I was actively working in the last thirty days. Not hypotheticals — real properties that looked fine on the MLS and weren't. None of them is visible in a listing photo. None of them shows up in the price.
1. Lot size, which nobody checks until it's too late
An out-of-state investor came to me with a clean brief: three bedrooms minimum, under $550,000, and a lot of at least 5,000 square feet. Reasonable. He wanted Summerlin.
I pulled every Summerlin listing in his range and ran each one through Clark County Assessor records.
One of nine cleared 5,000 square feet. The rest came in at roughly 0.08 to 0.11 acres — call it 3,500 to 4,800 square feet. One was 0.04 acres, a three-story rowhome on about 1,700 feet of land.
A note on that precision, because it matters: the county publishes lot size in acres to two decimal places. Multiplying that out gives a figure that looks exact to the square foot and isn't. A lot recorded as 0.11 acres is somewhere between about 4,570 and 5,010 square feet. Near a hard threshold, that band can decide whether a property qualifies — which is a good reason to check the plat rather than trusting a converted number, mine included.
That wasn't bad luck. Summerlin's master plan is built on compact lots. The single listing that clearly cleared his minimum returned 4.78%, well under his target.
The useful part isn't "avoid Summerlin." It's that the constraint wasn't price, and he'd never have found that by looking at listings. A listing tells you square footage of the house. The county tells you square footage of the land, and in this valley those two numbers are not related the way you'd expect. Two homes at the same price a few miles apart can differ by five thousand square feet of dirt.
2. HOA dues, which quietly eat your return
I screened a set of single-story homes for a cash buyer recently. Six qualified on every physical criterion. Four more looked identical on the MLS and were eliminated the moment I pulled the finance disclosure:
That last one is $2,016 a year. On a $325,000 purchase that's about 0.62% of the purchase price annually — before property tax, insurance, vacancy, maintenance, management or financing.
It does not change your gross yield. Gross yield is rent divided by price, and the HOA isn't in that equation. It changes what you keep, and it changes it every year you own the property.
Two listings at the same price, one with dues and one without, are not the same investment. They're usually not even close.
3. Age restriction, which shrinks your tenant pool
A property sat on an investor's shortlist for nearly three weeks before anyone established it was in an age-restricted community.
For an owner-occupant under 55, that's simply a mismatch. For an investor it's worse, because the restriction doesn't just limit who can buy — it limits who can rent. You're acquiring a property whose tenant pool is a fraction of the market, in a city with no shortage of alternatives.
Las Vegas has more age-restricted inventory than almost anywhere in the country, which is genuinely an advantage for the right buyer. It's a hidden cost for the wrong one, and it's a field on the listing that most people never read.
4. A rent comp that isn't what it looks like
This is the one that costs the most money, and it's the one I got wrong myself.
I was underwriting a Green Valley property and pulled leased comps. One came back at $2,950 a month — same year built, same bedroom count, similar square footage, no pool. On the summary grid it looked like a clean match. I used it.
Then the seller's agent pulled the full MLS record on that comp. It was:
Not one of those appears on the summary grid. Every one of them is worth money. The corrected number came in roughly $400 a month lower — which is $4,800 a year, on a purchase where the whole spread between a good deal and a mediocre one was smaller than that.
Asking rents are opinions. Leased rents are facts. And a leased rent on a summary grid is a fact with most of the context removed.
The pattern
Every one of these has the same shape. The listing shows you a number. The number is true. The number is not the thing that decides your return.
Price is the most visible variable and usually the least decisive. Lot size, carrying costs, who's allowed to live there, and what the property will actually lease for — those decide it, and all four sit one layer below the surface.
If you're buying from out of state, that layer is exactly what you can't check from where you are. Not because it's hidden, but because it's spread across county parcel records, listing finance disclosures and full MLS lease histories that you don't have access to and wouldn't have time to read if you did.
What I'd actually do
Before you fall for a property, get four things: the county's lot size, not the listing's. The HOA figure and the annual tax, together, as one carrying-cost number. Confirmation of whether there's an age restriction. And leased comps read in full, not off a grid.
That's a couple of hours of work per property, and it's the difference between a 6% that holds and a 6% that was never real.
If you want to know what a Las Vegas rental has to earn to hit your number before you start shopping, I keep a current report on it: what rentals actually need to rent for by area and price band, updated monthly, with the county data behind it.
And if you're already looking at something specific, send it to me. I'll pull the four numbers above and tell you what they say — including when they say don't.
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Nik Sharapov · REALTOR® · Nevada License S.0180179 · The Roland Team | LPT Realty · (702) 825-7763
Property characteristics referenced are from Clark County Assessor records; HOA and tax figures from MLS finance disclosures; lease figures from closed MLS lease records. Individual property details have been generalized. Market conditions change — figures are current as of the date of this post. This is general information, not investment, tax or legal advice. Equal Housing Opportunity.
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