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Let me count the ways … Over the course of the past two years, many “experts” have repeatedly predicted the housing market would go down in flames or death by 1,000 cuts, depending on who you read. I’m sure this isn’t a complete list but see if we can jog our memories of what the numerous causes were supposed to be. Email me if I’ve forgotten any.
Low Inventory; COVID; the election; rising prices; rising interest rates; the results of the election; a tsunami of foreclosures; murder hornets; delta variant; COVID bailouts; jobless claims; stock market plunging; Fed Funds rate rising; inflation and now the Russians are at it again. Sure, we could still be facing Global Thermonuclear War, but it seems as if the “experts” have been completely wrong for a long time. Can anything kill this market?
This “expert” thought it was going to be prices that finally stalled this market. Prices would just get so high that people would quit coming out to buy. With demand higher than ever and the record-setting results from February, this is clearly not the case … yet.
Our three friends: inventory, sales volume, and days on market are down yet again. This has been the status quo for a couple of years now and it doesn’t surprise anyone that they are still lingering. Price should have adversely affected the market by now, but no, we are making new highs in every single market in the northern front range. The strength in the current market is something other than the irrational exuberance we experienced years ago in the stock market. This is something new altogether.
The experts must be reading my stuff because they are beginning to change their tune. While most acknowledge the price increases can be burdensome, the expert articles have pivoted from doomsday to real information.
On March 2, HousingWire reported home showing traffic in the top 25 markets was up 14% in January over December and up 45% over last year … this is a leading indicator of demand. The same day, Mortgage News Daily quoted a CoreLogic report that predicts home prices will grow another (and a record-setting) 19% nationwide this year. These “experts” also run companies like Zillow ($881M loss), OpenDoor ($662M loss), and RedFin ($110M loss) can’t seem to figure out how to make a buck buying and selling homes in the most profitable real estate market the country has ever seen.
February 2022 Longmont Area Real Estate Statistics (.pdf)
February 2022 Longmont Area Real Estate Statistics (.jpg)
The average and median price gains in both Longmont single-family and attached homes, and Carbon Valley single-family homes, are in-line with price increases throughout Northern Colorado. I’d mentioned before that I was going to abandon the Boulder County Plains, last month you got a peek at Berthoud and this month it’s Loveland. And, as you can see, Loveland is no different than us: lower inventory, lower sales, fewer days on market and astonishing increases in average and median sales prices. The biggest difference is their prices are 10-15% lower than Longmont.
So … if you are looking for a place to move and not pay through the nose, look at Loveland. It’s a nice town. Note: In the stats report, the word Loveland is a link to a map for you to see the area covered.
Again, I had higher hopes for this months’ graph. I built one that was so complicated it was unreadable, so I had to break it in two. The same time period is covered by both graphs. The one on the left is new listings for the month. The one on the right is sales volume for the month. The red line is the average, and the black line is the past five months in both. This year the listing inventory is about 17% lower than both 2021 and the average, but believe it or not, it’s nearly identical to the winter of 2017-2018. So, it’s probably not as bad as you think it is.
It’s eye-opening — in February 2011 the median price of a home sold in Ft Collins was $239,000 — that was when the housing market began to turn positive after the recession. Eleven years later (in 2022) it’s $580,000. That’s a 142.7% return on your money for a profit of $341,000! This is real money, real equity, that many people don’t know they have. Let them know they can sell their big house and pay cash for a townhome in Greeley (median $319k, average $308k).
Cheers,
Kyle Snyder
