Positive News for Denver Real Estate

Jun 11th 09

filed under: Real Estate Answers

Here are some really great articles showing that the Colorado Real Estate and housing woes may hopefully be working towards an end. Colorado lead the nation into this housing bust by nearly two years. Colorado Real Estate was leading the nation in foreclosures at a time when the rest of the country [east and west coasts were appreciating at unsustainable rates]  so it’s only natural that we will pull out if this mess before the rest of the nation. This just proves the point that ALL REAL ESTATE IS LOCAL. Listening to the nightly news when they report national housing stats as though they are local news really has little meaning to your local market so beware of what you take from those wild news reports. Many areas of the Denver Metro are experiencing huge buying surges.

I normally do not like to re post articles from other sources but Jim Renshaw from Land Title makes it too easy to share these with you now.

Denver Tops Rebounding Housing Markets Barbara Corcoran highlights Denver as the number one recovering housing market on NBC’s Today Show saying, “Everything about Denver is pointing Up, Up, Up!” watch video here

Jobs May Recover First in Colorado: If you want to be in the right place when the recovery starts, that place may be in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas or Washington. The recession didn’t start at the same time in every state, and it won’t end at the same time either. A new forecast from Moody’s Economy.com predicts that jobs growth will return first in those five states, starting in the last quarter of this year. read more here

Colorado Business Conditions Improve, Goss Index Shows: A monthly indicator of expected business activity in Colorado improved in May to its highest level in several months, Creighton University economist Ernie Goss said Monday in his monthly regional Business Conditions Index survey. read more here

City of Grand Junction Selected as Large Community of Year: GJEP nominates City based on economic development accomplishments. Each year EDIE awards are given by the Economic Developers Council of Colorado (EDCC) to acknowledge individual, corporate and community contributions to the economic development of Colorado. read more here

Boulder Named “#1 Town to Live Well” by Forbes: Data came from ZoomProspector.com, a San Francisco-based consulting firm specializing in corporate relocation. It evaluated areas of the country with less than 100,000 people and named Boulder as number one town. read more here

Pending Home Sales Increase Nearly 7 Percent: The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contracts signed in April, rose 6.7 percent to 90.3 from a reading of 84.6 in March, and is 3.2 percent above April 2008 when it was 87.5.Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says buyers are responding to very favorable market conditions. “Housing affordability conditions have been at historic highs, but now the $8,000 first-time buyer tax credit is beginning to impact the market,” he says. “Since first-time buyers must finalize their purchase by November 30 to get the credit, we expect greater activity in the months ahead, and that should spark more sales by repeat buyers.” read more here

Great Article on Colorado from The Economist: read more here

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 11:42 PM and is filed under Real Estate Answers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. SurveyKid said at June 21st, 2009 at 2:29 PM

    Real estate is local in normal times. In historic bubbles and in the ensuing busts, real estate becomes monolithic, and highly correlated.

    We saw this during the bubble. Escalating values on the coasts and CA in particular drove gains in other markets, as young flexible workers simply had to choose other RE markets, in which to live.

    I agree that Colorado did not experience the bulk of the bubble. That said, the financial debacle is national, the debt bubble is national, the fact that all those jobs in housing and finance are never coming back–that too was part of a bubble. The bubble was in fact built over 25+ years. It was really just an edifice of debt.

    I’m positive on Colorado. But only on a relative basis. In fact it’s much easier to explain the landscape of Denver real estate if one looks back at Denver population over the past 50 years. Denver’s population peaked in 1970, and then declined for 20 years. While the population is now above the 1970 peak of 5.2 million to now reach 5.9 million, that makes for an astonishingly low annualized growth rate.

    Bottom line: there is no shortage of housing on the front range. None. It’s madness to build any more supply at this point. Sure, no/limited growth places like Boulder effectively ration supply. But they keep building in the Denver metro area.

    I don’t see any upside in front range RE from here. But look, that is gonna look “good” compared to the final 20-40% down move places like Calif have to endure.

    -The Kid

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