October 2019 Denver Real Estate Investor Market Update

Listen to the podcast or watch the video recording for all the details and exact numbers. Here’s the executive summary:

• Inventory: September 2018 is when I felt the Denver market “tap the brakes” and started to see inventory building. October 2019 inventory is about the same as the inventory in October 2018. It seems the inventory build has stabilized.
• Appreciation: Denver is still appreciating just not as fast as in previous years. It’s up about 3.5% from last October.
• Showings per listings: As expected, showings started to slow some due to seasonality. It didn’t drop off a cliff like it did last fall! It’s much higher now than this time last year.
• Metro Denver Rent and Vacancy report for Q3 from the Apartment Association of Metro Denver:
  • Rents are down slightly from Q2, but higher than Q3 of 2018.
  • The vacancy was down to 4.7% in Q3, which is lower than Q2 (5.0%) and Q3 2018 (5.5%).
  • All new apartment inventory was absorbed.
  • With low vacancy and high absorption, I wouldn’t bet on a looming apartment recession.
• According to CoreLogic, nationwide homes have appreciated in three of the last five recessions. What about Denver? Home prices have appreciated in four of the last 5 recessions. A recession does NOT equal a housing crisis.
• CoreLogic found that Denver property owners are sitting on a record high amount of home equity.  Don’t expect foreclosures or short sales to return anytime soon.  Additionally, Colorado has some of the lowest mortgage delinquency rates (over 90 days late) of any state in the US.  There’s no evidence of a bubble like we had in 2007.

Bottom line… we’re still in a seller’s market.