Hey Denver: Are you ready for some good news?

Thank heaven you don't live in California!

Amidst the gloomy news about interest rates rising globally and record-pace foreclosures comes this tidbit from Global Insight and National City Mortgage: Homes in Denver and its surrounding area are, on average, not badly overvalued.

If you're thinking "that's not very strongly worded good news, Jordan," thank heaven you don't live in Santa Barbara, California, where the average home is 41.9% overvalued.

Take a look at this map:

Here's a map of the U.S. of A., showing data for different regions. To me it's a bit puzzling that they chose the color gray for areas that are undervalued; nevertheless, green shows home values that are "Fairly Valued."

The map is really fun and interactive on their site, so click on it here to go play with it, or click here.

So that's good news, to me -- and it might be the silver lining inside the cloud of foreclosure activity we've had lately. Remember, for nine out of the 12 months of 2006, Colorado led the nation in new foreclosures (and foreclosures artificially increase the inventory of homes for sale, which plays into the "supply and demand" effect, driving home values downward.)

So what this means to you and me is that we can buy a home today and not fear that when the time comes to sell, we will have to lose a major piece of equity simply because we paid too much.