After a year of not-always-great-news for Nevada’s two major urban centers, we are choosing to kick off today’s Fact Pack on a positive note: J.D. Power’s most recent annual North American Airport Satisfaction Study resulted in a Top 5 rating for LAS among mega airports, defined as those with 33 million or more passengers per year. Top 10:

List source: CNBC as of 2025

The study measured passenger satisfaction by asking more than 30,000 travelers about their experiences across seven metrics between July 2024 and July 2025:

• Ease of travel through airport

• Level of trust with airport

• Terminal facilities

• Airport staff

• Departure/to airport experience

• Food, beverage and retail

• Arrival/from airport experience

New LVGEA CEO Nears Two-month Mark

One Southern Nevada economic note leads to another…

For those who may have missed it going into Labor Day weekend at the long, hot summer’s end, Danielle Casey, a former Executive Vice President of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, became President and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA).

She took the reins from interim CEO Betsy Fretwell, who is serving as a strategic advisor through year-end, and recently sat down with Vegas PBS anchor Amber Dixon for an on-camera interview to talk about her experience and goals for the Southern Nevada economy.

Markets

For those not already obsessively checking on an hourly basis, here’s a screen shot of S&P performance to start the week and over the past three years:

As of Monday, Oct. 20, 1:54 pm (Pacific Time)

Home Sales Profits

Homeowners in the U.S. made a 49.9 percent profit on typical single-family home and condo sales during Q3, up slightly from the 49.3 percent profit margin posted in Q2 but still below the 55.4 percent profit sellers saw in the third quarter of 2024, according to data from ATTOM, a leading curator of land, property data, and real estate analytics.

How does this compare to recent years? Fact Pack co-publisher and economist John Restrepo:

After the recovery from the Great Recession and prior to 2020, home sellers across the country were seeing profit margins of around 30 percent, on average. As the COVID-19 pandemic led an increasing number of people to seek more living space and buy larger homes, average profits doubled to more than 60 percent by the middle of 2022. The typical seller’s return has been dropping steadily since that peak, holding just below 50 percent over the last three quarters.

Data shows that home prices continue to rise. The median national sales price in Q3 was $370,000, up 1.2 percent from the previous quarter and 3.4 percent from the same time last year. The typical home sale netted $123,100 in raw profit, up 1.9 percent from the previous quarter but down 3.5 percent from the third quarter of 2024.

Profit margins down in most metro areas, Florida sees biggest drops

Profit margins fell quarter-over-quarter in 58.6 percent (92) of the 157 large metro areas in ATTOM’s analysis and fell year-over-year in 84.1 percent (132) of those communities. The metro areas with the biggest annual drops in profit margins were:

• Ocala, FL (down from 103.9 percent to 55.1 percent)

• Punta Gorda, FL (down from 88.3 percent to 58 percent)

• Vallejo, CA (down from 66.4 percent to 43 percent)

• North Port-Sarasota, FL (down from 61.1 to 38.8 percent)

• Port St. Lucie, FL (down from 77.8 percent to 56.1 percent).

The largest annual increases in home sale profit margins came in:

• St. George, UT (up from 26.3 percent in the third quarter of 2024 to 37.2 percent in the third quarter of 2025)

• Gulfport, MS (up from 26.2 percent to 35.7 percent)

• Augusta, SC (up from 37.8 percent to 43.7 percent)

• Lexington, KY (up from 42.9 percent to 48.6 percent)

• Dayton, OH (up from 55.1 percent to 60.7 percent).

Among metro areas with populations over 1 million, the biggest annual drops in typical home sales profit margins were in

• Tampa, FL (down from 70.7 percent to 54.3 percent)

• Seattle, WA (down from 93.6 percent to 80.2 percent)

• Fresno, CA (down from 70.9 percent to 57.7 percent)

• Boston, MA (down from 81.8 percent to 70 percent)

• Jacksonville, FL (down from 56.7 percent to 45.2 percent).

Trend graph:

As of Q3 2025

Notably, owners had held the homes sold Q3 for an average of 8.39 years before selling them, the longest average homeownership tenure in at least 25 years and up from 8.13 years for homes sold in the previous quarter.

The metro areas with the longest average homeownership tenure—the time between purchase and sale—for homes sold in the third quarter were

• Barnstable, MA (14.4 years)

• San Francisco, CA (13.1 years)

• Santa Cruz, CA (13.1 years)

• Eureka, CA (13 years)

• Bridgeport, CT (12.8 years).

The metro areas with the shortest average homeownership tenures were:

• Provo, UT (6.9 years)

• Oklahoma City, OK (7.1 years)

• Austin, TX (7.3 years); Chattanooga, TN (7.35 years)

• San Antonio, TX (7.4 years).

As of Q3 2025

Opioid Prescriptions by State

Southern states tended to have the highest opioid dispensing rates per 100 persons in 2023, including Arkansas (71.5), Alabama (71.4), Mississippi (63.1), and Louisiana (62.7), according to data on 55,000 pharmacies from the CDC.

States with the lowest rates were spread out geographically: Hawaii (22.6), California (23.8), New Jersey (26.3), and New York (26.3).

Nevada (40.1) is in the better half of states nationally (purple and blue in the map graphics below) but is worse than most of the Mountain West:

Source: Visual Capitalist As of 2023

Infographic for the U.S.:

As of 2023

Astute readers probably already surmised that southern states experience higher rates of poverty, unemployment, economic hardship, and health-related pain, all of which correlate strongly with increased opioid prescribing and misuse.

Facts that might not be quite so intuitive: The southern region of the country has a higher percentage of populations engaged in injury-prone occupations, leading to more pain-related medical visits and subsequent opioid prescriptions.

“Top” 12:

As of 2023

Causes for Optimism

This Bloomberg piece lists a host of reasons for a positive outlook as explained by a number of subject matter experts working in a variety of sectors. A few of our favorites:

• Social saunas will help people feel more connected, less lonely: [The] “New Sauna Wave,” which established itself in Europe and is gaining momentum in the U.S… Sauna Baths have all the health benefits of the hot air and cold plunges that monoverse podcasts espouse, but are primarily focused on community use and socializing.

• Libraries and other public spaces will become centers of neighborhood revival: Cities across the U.S. are using libraries to revitalize downtowns, often with multi-use branches that offer everything from tool lending to yoga classes, and in Donelson, Tennessee, a shoddy strip mall has been made into a sleek new library branch and a walkable, pleasant town center.

• Kids will spend less time on their phones — if other nations follow Australia’s lead. The nation down under recently passed legislation banning under-16s from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other digital platforms. Similar measures are in the works in New Zealand and Denmark.

Pew Research graphic from 2020 (newer data on the topic is little changed):

As of 2020

As of 2020

• GLP-1 makers are dropping prices on drugs that tend to make takers healthier. For example, Novo Nordisk has been expanding access to its drug, Ozempic, via substantial price-cutting deals with CVS, Walmart, and Costco. The drug has been credited with weight loss and management, as well as with improving cardiovascular health, kidney disease, and some substance use disorders.

Data supporting the claim:

As of 2024

• The “babel fish”: Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 can translate whatever language you’re hearing into your native tongue. Tech pros in the word translation space say we will soon live in a world where everybody has simultaneous-translation bots in their ears, allowing an exponential leap in cross-cultural conversation and understanding.

Want to share what’s helping you feel optimistic in these troubled times? Send thoughts to weekend@bloomberg.net with a kind mention that you read about the topic in Fact Pack.

On the Horizon

• Tuesday: Netflix and GM will report quarterly earnings, and Canada will report CPI

• Wednesday: Tesla will report earnings, and the UK will report CPI

• Thursday: Intel will report earnings, and data will be released on existing home sales

• Friday: CPI data delayed by the government shutdown is expected

Marketwatch calendar:

Data & Dialogue About the Economy



The Fact Pack is a monthly business e-report co-authored by Mike PeQueen of Hightower Las Vegas and John Restrepo of RCG Economics, which combines important metrics relevant to business decision makers and financial commentary on the current issues facing the economy.

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