real estate market, still going up? (Colorado Springs, Golden: housing, condos, rent)

[Coloradoan]

Originally Posted by WagneriTeam

Great News! Colorado Springs homeowners saw a healthy appreciation in 2007! The Colorado Springs real estate market saw an average sales price of $269,075. This is UP from the 2006 average sales price of $264,755. In fact, Colorado Springs has seen great appreciation since the MLS started recording data in 1994. The average sales price in Colorado Springs has jumped $100,000 since 1999!
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I am curious where you are getting your statistics from? I am seeing less positive information for the '06 vs. '07 average sales price and appreciation on the Pikes Peak Association of Realtors site. Available for public viewing at: Statistics

[hello-world]

Originally Posted by WagneriTeam

Great News! Colorado Springs homeowners saw a healthy appreciation in 2007! The Colorado Springs real estate market saw an average sales price of $269,075. This is UP from the 2006 average sales price of $264,755. In fact, Colorado Springs has seen great appreciation since the MLS started recording data in 1994. The average sales price in Colorado Springs has jumped $100,000 since 1999!
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by the way, this is only about a 1.6% appreciation rate, below inflation. better than a DEpreciation rate, though, i'd guess.

what is breakdown for property type? condo? single family? 1 br? 4 br?

how does the CO springs market trend with the denver market? it seems to me that if one deflates, the other might deflate after a while...OR, if one begins picking back up, the other might, too? (people deciding to move to one versus the other based in part on housing costs, e.g.).

oh. never mind on some of this...i see someone posted some stuff that answers some of it. and, yeah, it DOES look quite a bit worse on coloradoan's link. what IS up with that? is wagneriteam's the total MLS for the springs, and coloradoan's the MLS for just pike's peak?

[bashep]

Coloradoan's stats do cover all of Colorado Springs. Stats from Wagneriteam came from their company website. I tried to go on their site and see where they get their stats from and couldn't find it. Hopefully they will come back on here and tell us where their stats are from. Most realtors use the PPMLS (Coloradoan's Stats) for all their numbers, they are usually the most accurate.

[suzco]

Originally Posted by WagneriTeam

Great News! Colorado Springs homeowners saw a healthy appreciation in 2007! The Colorado Springs real estate market saw an average sales price of $269,075. This is UP from the 2006 average sales price of $264,755. In fact, Colorado Springs has seen great appreciation since the MLS started recording data in 1994. The average sales price in Colorado Springs has jumped $100,000 since 1999!
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The Colorado Springs Gazette is decidedly less optimistic about the market in the Springs.

Colorado Springs’ housing market suffered through one of its worst downturns in recent memory during 2007. Foreclosures broke a 19-year-old record, home construction slowed to a pace not seen since the early 1990s and home sales fell.

Don’t expect much of a turnaround in 2008, some economists and real estate experts said Wednesday.

The Gazette Article

[hello-world]

Originally Posted by bashep

Coloradoan's stats do cover all of Colorado Springs. Stats from Wagneriteam came from their company website. I tried to go on their site and see where they get their stats from and couldn't find it. Hopefully they will come back on here and tell us where their stats are from. Most realtors use the PPMLS (Coloradoan's Stats) for all their numbers, they are usually the most accurate.

i saw that the stats from the pikespeak (that's a company, right?) site were from the PPMLS (pikes peak multiple listing service, i'm guessing, and so i can only imagine that's for whatever business PP has done with the listings). so, maybe they're both from company numbers? what is "pikes peak" in the context of this? i know pikes peak is a summit near the springs, but, is this a company, too?

[Mike from back east]

Very smart economists do not expect the national housing market to rebound until 2009, after national elections and credit crunch run their course. Until then the market will go sideways or fluctuate a bit month to month. Only notable upside in COL SPGS is the steady pace of growth at Fort Carson, begun 1-2 years ago and continues through 2013, adding 1-2 thousand troops per year, plus an average of 2 family members per soldier. That may take up some slack in the housing market, especially on the south side of town and possibly out in the Banning-Lewis Ranch project on the east side.

[Katiana]

Originally Posted by jplmr

Wow my family will be relocating there no later than June 2009. We plan on living off base and using our BAH to pay for the cost. Hopefully the market won't get to expensive by then. I would really hate to have to live in government quarters again. What about utilities, here in NY I can pay an average of $200 a month to heat a single story 2 bedroom. Its crazy to me.

Unless something crazy happens, you should be able to do that. I don't know about utilities in COS, up here in Denver we pay ~$150/mo total, gas and electric per mo. for a two-story 4 BR. That is in the winter. Sometimes higher, depending on how cold it gets. Not usually as cold as upstate NY.

[Bob from down south]

The COS real estate market is in a real state of decline (both prices and volume) like most others in the nation. I don't care what Marianne Wagner's Everlasting Gobstopper Sunshine Machine is pumping out. The homes I've been watching (in the $400K range) have nearly all dropped around 10% since September 07. Prices may be have been up $100K since 1999, but those bubblicious overvaluations are being systematically cut down to size every month now.

Your biggest worry is that DoD will figure that out and start dropping the BAH at a commensurate rate.

As to the the generations behind the boomers being left out, well, Poppycock! I think an alternate reality to Jazzlover's view is opening up. The one where the boomers look around and wonder why the house they paid $500K for is only worth $300K, and that only to a handful of people that can qualify for a $300K mortgage with a (gasp) 20% down payment and actual proof of a six-figure income... The only Gen-X and Gen-Y types left out are the ones that can't stay out of debt and/or cobble together a meaningful down payment.

Cheers

[msjack]

Originally Posted by pittnurse70

Unless something crazy happens, you should be able to do that. I don't know about utilities in COS, up here in Denver we pay ~$150/mo total, gas and electric per mo. for a two-story 4 BR. That is in the winter. Sometimes higher, depending on how cold it gets. Not usually as cold as upstate NY.

WOW! I can't believe these prices. I have been considering moving to COS from NOVA/DC area. Everything thing just seems far better than here-the prices, the atmosphere, the people. For my 1 bd apt just my electric bill was usually almost $150 in the winter. Not to mention I was paying $1094 a month in not the greatest area either. Prices here are outrageous. COS seems better everyday. Hopefully I will be there soon enough!

[Bob from down south]

MikeFBE moved the market economics discussion from this thread to the Colorado main forum.

One thing I wanted to amplify on here, though, is the need to take real estate statistics with a grain of salt. I spent some time digging into this over the last weekend, and here are the sorts of statistical "anomalies" I see:

Prices. The most often used metric is median sales price, meaning that half of the houses sold were more expensive, half less expensive. When average price is quoted, it can be heavily skewed by the sale of just a few über-expensive houses, especially when the total number sold is low. But another problem, even with median price comparisons, is that in a down market like we're seeing now, certain sectors move better than others. If, for example, the expensive homes in the 500-700K range are moving but the entry-level homes in the 150-250K range are not, then median price will show an increase. The only really good measure...and one hard to do, is to look at year over year comparable home sales. The Case-Schiller index uses a variation of this technique, and therefore is one of the better indicators of price movement.

Time to sell, or days-on-market (DOM). Days on market data are manipulated routinely by the realty system. It's not uncommon at all, for example, for a house listed for many months to be pulled off the market and then re-listed, essentially starting the DOM clock at zero, and not reflecting that the house already sat on the market for a long time. Some MLS systems require a house to be off the market 30 or 60 days for that reset to happen (houses are often pulled at end of year and re-listed for the Spring peak sales season), and others allow a house to be withdrawn and re-listed in much less time. When you see average DOM for houses selling, it doesn't reflect that some of those houses were on the market far longer than what's on the current listing. And the DOM stats quoted by realtors are usually for houses that sold--they don't take into account houses that have been sitting for a very long time without selling.

List price to sales price ratios. Realtors use this number to show buyers are getting close to their asking prices for properties, implying that list prices in the local market are where they should be. But the LP/SP ratio is based on the listing price at time of sale...it does not take into account the many many cases where the original asking price is lowered over and over again until finally an offer is made. For example a house listed originally at $250,000, then lowered to $225,000, then to $200,000, which then sells at $198,000 will show a SP/LP ratio of 0.99--the seller got 99% of his asking price, right? Well, sort of, but he really got 79% of his original asking price. So on any given day, there are a good number of houses on the market that will end up with their prices reduced before a sale occurs--and some will be reduced multiple times--so one can't assume the list prices are any decent indicator of what homes are actually going for, especially in a deteriorating market like we have now.

Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) When you ask a realtor to "pull comps" on a property you're considering, make sure to look at the sales dates on those comps. In a dead and/or declining market, you might get comps that are 6-12 months or more old, which reflect what those homes sold for before the doo-doo hit the fan. I wouldn't use anything more than 90 days old right now (even 90 days is suspect in a lot of areas)...and if there aren't enough within 90 days, expand the area, or ask your agent (your agent, i.e. a buyer's broker, not the seller's agent) for another way of gauging the prices of comparable houses in the area. In a rapidly declining market, you will probably want to drop your offer to account for the passage of time since the comps sold, too. For example, if I see 4 comps averaging around $200,000 and 60 days old, and know the market is probably declining 4% this year, those comp values have already come down around $1333 in the 2 months since those houses sold, and will come down that much again in the 60 days from offer to closing.

The bottom line, for me, is to realize that real estate agents are eternal optimists and pumpers of sunshine. Nothing illegal in that, but they want you to have happy feelings about the market, the neighborhood, and the houses they're showing, even if the market is as dead and the house is as appealing as a three-day-old mackerel. Question everything. In the end, you're paying for it.

Bob