Living Littleton

   Vacancy rates in the Littleton and Denver Metro area continue their downward trend.   In fact, they’re the lowest since 2001, according to the Denver Post.  This low rate is contributed to the fact more people are moving here, coupled with the fact fewer apartments are being built.  To give you an idea of how quickly rates have fallen, they were at 9% in the second quarter of 2009.  We’re also seeing a very healthy rental rate in single family homes from what Realtors were saying at a quarterly real estate trends class, I attended.  With very little apartment construction in the planning stages, along with the continued growth, experts are predicting rates to fall even lower in the coming quarters.  This will ultimately lead to higher rates and pickier land lords.

Jerry Becker
www.jerrybeckerandassoc.com

   High end homes in the Denver/Littleton area are starting to rebound from their record lows.  It’s no secret that the high end home market has been close to dormant over the last couple of years, with the uncertainty in the market coupled with the difficulty in obtaining jumbo loan financing.  The good news is that we are starting to see in increase in this market for homes priced over a million dollars.  In fact, sales in this price range have risen to a level not seen in two years.  Several factors have contributed to this, the most important being the steep discounting some sellers have been forced to do, in order to get their homes sold.  Coupled with a slowly building demand, record low rates, and the beginning of some sanity in the mortgage industry,  buyers are starting to become more active in this price range.

    This increase in the high end market may pull up the average sales prices in the Denver/Littleton market.  If this happens, hopefully buyers won’t be lead to believe all home prices have increased by the announce price increase, if there is one.  As I always stress, these figures are the average prices of all the homes sold, not the percentage increase in prices.

For the fifth month in a row Denver Metro home prices, which includes Littleton, have shown an increase in year over year pricing.  There was also a slight increase from February of this year to March of this year.  These statistics came from the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

The report showed the the average price increase from a year ago was 4.1%.  Once again, I want to stress that these are the averages of all the homes sold in the respective months, and not the increase of 4.1% for each home. 

Since much of the market was driven by the push of first time buyers to take advantage of the expiring tax credit, I suspect the market was weighted to more of the entry home price range.  We may see another increase in April as that was the last month to take advantage of the tax credit.  After that, the experts predict the number of sales will slow, however, we may see more of a mix of higher priced homes because of the fall off from first time buyers.  This may give us a continued increase in year over year prices, however, the total number of home sales may decline.  These experts also expected interest rates to be higher by now, but in fact, they’ve declined.  It’ll be interesting to see how all of this shakes out.            

Another index is a comparison of a market’s present average home values when compared to the year 2000.  Based on that index, Denver and Littleton came in at 125.31.  That means prices were 25.31% higher than they were in 2000.  The average for the top 20 cities was 143.35 in March.

Jerry Becker
Jerry Becker and Associates – Metro Brokers
jbeckerhomes@comcast.net