December cheer for the Denver market
If you want to be a housing Grinch, there's plenty of doom-and-gloom clouding the Denver-area and national housing markets. But given that this is the holiday season, John Rebchook, the writer of Inside Real Estate News talked with me about the positive side of the Denver real estate market. To read the full article with John's commentary, please visit Inside Real Estate News. Even though 2010 is arguably the worst housing market in recent history by many metrics, there are things to be positive about.
Foreclosures down from last year
The No. 1 reason the Denver-area housing market can give thanks is that the foreclosure inventory is going down. The biggest reason is that fewer people are losing their homes. That is not to say that we are out of the woods. There is a lot of talk about the "shadow" inventory (of unsold homes not yet on the market) out there. If you remember, at the beginning of the year, there was a lot of talk about foreclosures accelerating in 2010. For whatever reasons, foreclosures decelerated instead. That means more people are staying in their homes or were able to convince the bank to accept less than the mortgage amount in a short sale.
And foreclosures don't just hurt people who lose their homes. When homes end up in foreclosure, they reduce the value of surrounding homes sometimes entire neighborhoods. A drop in foreclosures is good for everybody.
It's Denver
The second reason is simply that this is Denver real estate. Many other markets have been slammed with a blizzard of bad news, and they face much bumpier rides before they began to recover. The closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller report, for example, notes that the Denver housing market is off about 10 percent from its peak, while overall, the 20 metropolitan areas in its index are down almost 25 percent from their peaks.
Sure, that may not warm your heart if you need to sell your home for a loss, but ask yourself: Would you rather have bought a home in Las Vegas in 2006 or a home in Denver that year? Denver did not fall off the cliff.
"Data Transparency"
Another thing that all home buyers, home sellers and consumers can be grateful for is the ease and availability of "data transparency" in the market. At 8z Real Estate, data transparency is one of our core values.
Great Rates
Mortgage rates, which hit historic lows of just over 4 percent, and now are hovering around 5 percent, still extremely low by historic standards, truly were blessings for thousands of buyers and owners refinancing in this year.
I call interest rates the red-headed step-child of 2010. They are the gift that nobody really appreciates. It's the gift that keeps on giving for 30 years. There are people who got 30-year mortgages in 2010 that may never refinance. This is not fake stuff. This is your payment going from $2,500 to $1,800. It is real money.
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