In Broomfield, there were just eight new listings for the entire month in January.
The low housing inventory seen in Colorado remains “unprecedented and shocking” to even the state’s most experienced realtors, the Colorado Association of Realtors said in its new January report.
New listings that came in January were quickly gobbled up as pending or under-contract sales.
Statewide, just 4,151 single-family properties were listed — a 44.5% dip from January 2021, when 7,480 single-family homes were listed. That’s about half as many as the 14,520 single-family listings in Colorado pre-pandemic.
The 1,011 active condo and townhome listings were down more than 68% from 3,173 listings a year ago. January 2020 saw 5,097 attached home listings.
In the seven-county Denver-metro area, just over 1,400 single-family homes were available in January, down 57% from a year ago. There were just 461 condo or townhome properties listed, off 74% from January 2021.
For Colorado and the Denver metro, just half a month's supply of inventory is on the market, which once again represents a record low. A balanced market, according to the National Association of Realtors, would have about six months of inventory supply.
The CAR Monthly Market Statistical Reports are prepared by a third-party real estate technology company and are based on data provided by Multiple Listing Services (MLS) in Colorado.
The record-low inventory is driving up prices. The median pricing held steady from December to January, while year-over-year median pricing is about 17% to 19% higher. Condo or townhome properties are on the higher end of that range.
CAR’s Housing Affordability Index — a measure of how affordable a region’s housing is to consumers based on interest rates, median sales price and median income by county — is down 22% from a year prior for the Denver metro and for the state.
New data from the National Association of Realtors found that there are 400,000 fewer homes that would be considered affordable for those that earn between $75,000 and $100,000 nationally compared to the start of the pandemic.
Some local markets showed staggering lows. In Broomfield, for example, there were just eight new listings for the entire month in January.
Kelly Moye, a realtor who works in the Broomfield and Boulder area, said that while the story of low inventory and high demand has been happening for about two years now, the lows that Boulder and Broomfield are hitting are still unprecedented.
“First, there are eight new listings for the entire month of January in Broomfield. Eight listings. That is a number that many realtors carry on their own for the month, not the entire real estate community, combined,” Moye wrote in her commentary. “With only eight new listings and a few new construction homes still on the market from December, the mad rush to buy in this area has pushed the prices up by a whopping 36% since last January.”
She added that the 1,100 homes destroyed by the Marshall fire have only exacerbated the issue.
In all of Superior — one of the communities hit hard by the fire — there are just two listings for sale and 23 under contract. Shortly after the fire, Moye told the Denver Business Journal that the fire made a tight for-sale and rental housing market in the Boulder County region even tighter.
The CAR report is in line with the Denver Metro Association of Realtors report released at the beginning of February, which said that the Denver metro hit a new record low in January of just 1,184 listing at the end of the month. Both reports have their own methodologies, and the DMAR report includes 11 counties in the Denver metro area.
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