Denver Real Estate MLS Market Stats – January 2021

The Denver MLS trends data for January 2021 is out. Comparing year over year (January 2020 to January 2021) is better than comparing the previous month, because we have defined seasonality trends.

Key Takeaways from January 2021 vs. January 2020

Here is the report for January in Denver.

Number of Active Listings

• off 53% from last year
• off 9% from December (that’s a pretty normal seasonal change)

Number of Units Closed

• off 10% from this time last year (mostly likely due to inventory shortage)
• off 42% from Dec (that’s more than a typical seasonal drop-off)
• I’m not too concerned about this; looking at a longer time horizon, Januaary 2021 closed count was a little above January 2019 and about the same as January 2018.  January 2020 as an unusually strong month.

 Closed Price

• Average – up 16% from this time last year
• Average – up 2% from December
• Again, the scarcity of inventory is driving the pricing
• The median are up less +9%.
• This indicates that a lot of the price increase is driven by a mix shift of more large, expensive homes selling
• The extreme lack of small, affordable homes is driving some of this increase

Days on Market

• 27 DOM, 40% faster than last January

Showing Traffic

• I sent this out a few days ago; the numer of showings per active listing was very high in Denver and CO Springs

Under Contract

• Only off -1% from January 2020, so February closed units could be reasonably close to last year
• Hopefully, the drop in closed units in January 2021 was a one-time aberration.
• The median number of days on market dropped from 26 to 6 (!)

Months of Inventory

• 0.6 for homes
• 1.0 for condos

Don’t expect distress sales to bring any meaningful amount of inventory to the market:

ATTOM Data Solutions released their homeownership study showing distressed sales dropped to a 15 year low of 7.8% of all US single family and condo sales in 2020. The average homeownership tenure rose to an all-time high of 8.33 years. Both of these records worsen our inventory shortage

In December 2010, we closed 1,032 distressed homes. That represented 36.2% of all closings. This past December, we only closed 11 distressed homes representing 0.2% of all closings. Of the 11, five were bank owned, three were HUD foreclosures and three were short sales. As moratoriums on foreclosures begin to expire, distressed sales are expected to increase but nowhere near the levels of 2010

Source: The above executive summary is from Lon Welsh of Your Castle Real Estate.

Denver Housing Trends January 2021

Showing per active listing trends for Denver

Here are the showing trends for January.  Off the charts!

YouTube Video: Denver Real Estate Trends – January 2021