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Price drop for homes not as bad in Denver

By John Rebchook, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 7, 2009 at 8:56 p.m.

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It may be small consolation if you bought a home in the Denver area at the top of the market, but the local residential real estate market is in far better shape than almost any other major metropolitan area in the country.

The most recent S&P/Case- Shiller report showed that Denver-area home prices were down 5.2 percent in the 12 months ending in October, compared with an average 18 percent drop for the 20 cities in the index.

"The latest Case-Shiller report and the National Association of Realtors report on pending sales, show that Denver is a market unto itself and is maintaining our prices better when you compare it to almost any other city in the country," said independent broker Gary Bauer.

The S&P/Case-Shiller report uses a different methodology than Metrolist (which shows a 13 percent drop in average home sale prices in 2008) in that it matches the value of individual homes, while Metrolist tracks all homes.

The most recent S&P/Case- Shiller report shows that home prices in Phoenix dropped 32.7 percent, Las Vegas 31.7 percent, and San Francisco 31 percent.

"If we were the Inland Empire (the San Bernardino-Riverside area of California), we would have lost half our value," said Lou Barnes, principal of Boulder West Financial. "We never got that bad and we won't."

Barnes is not a fan of either S&P/Case-Shiller or Metrolist because they only track homes that have sold. He thinks the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which attempts to track the value of the far greater number of homes on the market that are not for sale by analyzing refinance data, provides a more accurate reflection of the market.

OFHEO shows the overall Denver market as being basically flat, he said.

By contrast, many other markets across the country will continue to see home values decline and foreclosures rise at a rapid clip, he said.

Denver, by contrast, has been grappling with a foreclosure crisis for the past seven or eight years, and much of the worst of it appears to be over, he said.

Comments

  • January 12, 2009

    5:52 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Quagmate writes:

    Denver metro may be the most realtor/bank manipulated market in the entire country. The foreclosure laws are a joke.

    You want a comparison? Minnesota has 34K home for sale with a comparable population. Colorado has 72K homes for sale and a realtor friend of mine says the number is far closer to 84K.

    Arizona has 81K homes, yet they are mentioned as someplace doing much worse. Nevada has only 38K, yet their market is off 31 percent.

    Don't buy the propaganda people, the realtors in this town (home to Remax I might add) are the ones in control. The Banks are in with it too; the banks own so much property in Denver it is a poster child for the current economic crisis. No market is an island, we are still 10 to 15 percent over valued and I'm being conservative.

    Point - A home I bought in 1996 for 156K, sold three years ago for 315K. A 100% mark up in ten years? Doubled in value? The home was 10 years older.

    Be very careful. Wait for the bottom people. Don't buy. The only way this changes is if the banks stop listening to the realtors.