The “Shadow” Market

While the Denver area population continues to grow, the home ownership rate continues to shrink. This, along with things like the construction defect laws, is causing what I am calling the “shadow” market on the Denver area as we see more and more apartment buildings with less new condos and homes.

While some estimates put the growth for Colorado to be around 100k in total population for 2017, it is easy to see that there is a gap in housing with a total of 61k residential transactions for 2016 in the metro area. I think this is an easy trend to anticipate to continue throughout the year.

Breakout of Property Type

With the multi family sales totaling 48% of the commercial landscape in Denver county for last year, it’s easy to see how the topic of apartments make up a major part of our expectations for 2017.

Another interesting thing to point out is that we are seeing renters spend more as a total percentage of their income for rent. The Denver Post had a good article on this:

Denver Renters

Apartments / MUH

I like to look at the history with both a view on the dollar volume and the number of transactions. This type of a view on the data allows us to quickly see short term trends and measure if our current period is a peak or valley. Let me know if you have any requests in how to look at the data, and I’m happy to play with the information to assist.

Denver Commercial Report – February 2017