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Would You Pay This Much for 400 Square Feet?

24 factory-built condos will be added in the Berkeley neighborhood in the 4300 block of Tennyson Street and is called The Kasita on Tennyson. Two small buildings are currently being demolished and a ground floor retail building will be constructed. Then, the developers will use a crane to put the 24 modular condos on top…

When Will Denver Home Prices Drop?

I printed off 2 important slides from my Bubble class, one slide showing detached home prices back to 1971 and then months of inventory back to 1985 and here is what I see— Home prices finally dropped in 1988 after 3 consecutive years of 10+ months of inventory. I was shocked that it took that…

Local Denver News

According to RentCafe 11,000 SFRs turned from owner occupied into rentals since 2007 in the city of Denver, a 37% increase. Second, as of 2016 only 52.6% of housing in Denver County is owned occupied. Wallet Hub rated Colorado as the 9th best state for Millennials. U.S. News & World Report just released their “Best…

Denver is a Low Risk Market

Arch Mortgage Insurance released their Risk Index last week and here is what they said about Denver— Our risk ranking is “low” and our Index Score was 15, consistent with our long-term average Even with our rapidly rising prices our volatility is considered “low”. Our per capita income increased 5% in 2017.

Zillow to Buy & Sell Homes

Zillow announced last Thursday that they will soon begin buying homes from sellers directly and then re-selling homes in Phoenix and Las Vegas. Zillow will make the “necessary repairs and updates” before re-selling their homes. In essence, they will become Fix and Flippers. But, they will not cut RE Agents out of their commissions as…

Over $5 Trillion in Home Equity

According to Black Knight today’s homeowners have the highest level of “tapable equity” on record with tapable equity as defined as home equity below 80% of the value of their home. For example, if their home is worth $500k and they owe $300k on their home, they have $100k in tapable equity in their home.…

2/3 of Renters Believe Renting is More Affordable

Freddie Mac commissioned a survey by Harris Poll of 1,209 multi-family renters from across the country at the end of January. About 67% of all renters say renting is more affordable than owning a home. And 67% of all renters also said they will continue renting for financial reasons, up from 59% 2 years ago.…

Less Than 1 Month of Inventory

I received the 7 county MLS report from SMDRA for March and here are the highlights. First and foremost the average price of a detached home exceeded $500k for the first time ever! Second, the sale to list price ratio hit 100.7% last month, the highest ever for March! Buyers purchased 4,203 homes last month,…

Construction Costs Continue to Soar

This was a great article in the Colorado RE Journal written by 2 officers at JLL Multifamily Capital Markets about the struggles of apartment developers. Builders’ biggest challenge is the soaring cost of labor and the authors point out this problem is not getting any better. Why? Just in Denver County there are $5.5 billion…

The Amazon Effect on Real Estate

I read an article in Builder Magazine’s newsletter last week on the impact that Amazon has had on RE in Seattle since 2010. Amazon has added over 40k new direct jobs and over 53k ancillary jobs since 2010 and the average new home price has increased by 83% to $694k and existing home prices have…

Detroit is as Unaffordable as Denver

The Urban Institute released last week a report titled “Housing Affordability: Local and National Perspectives” with 2 key metrics. First, is the homeownership rate in every major metro city and second is what percentage of renters could afford to buy a home in each city as well. I found this fact incredibly fascinating. For metro…

Silicon Valley Is Moving to Denver

The Denver Business Journal’s cover story this past week was on the increase of tech jobs since 2012, an increase of 14,184 new jobs in the last 6 years. The DBJ reported that more than a dozen Silicon Valley companies have recently moved their headquarters to Denver or opened an office here that will be…