Like the delayed runoff now surging through creeks and rivers along the Front Range, listings continued to flow into metro Denver’s housing market last month, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
Despite lower borrowing costs, buyers fell short when it came to absorbing the new inventory, even for the most affordable tier of homes, which usually see rock-solid demand.
Buyers purchased 5,234 homes and condos in metro Denver last month, a decline of 14.31 percent from May and 14.34 percent from June of last year, according to the DMAR counts. What has been the strongest segments of the market for demand, homes and condos priced below $500,000, experienced a 13.5 percent monthly drop in sales.
The number of homes and condos available for sale in metro Denver at the end of June was 9,520, an increase of 7.1 percent from May and up 28 percent from June 2018.
Metro Denver hasn’t had so many homes available for sale since October 2013, noted Jill Schafer, head of DMAR’s market trends committee and an area real estate agent. The inventory remains below the historical average for June of 16,577.
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The median price of a single-family home sold in June was $465,500, down 0.11 percent from May and up 2.3 percent from a year earlier. The median price of a condo was $310,000, down 1.59 percent from May and up 1.64 percent from a year earlier.
A report Tuesday from John Burns Real Estate Consulting listed Denver as one the metro areas experiencing the greatest de-acceleration in home prices this year.
Denver has experienced a 5 percentage point decline in its rate of increase, which was on par with Tampa; Orlando; Portland, Ore.; Riverside, Calif.; and Jacksonville, Fla.
San Jose suffered the biggest reversal, going from a growth rate of 20 percent a year ago to a 6 percent decline.
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“Last year, San Jose was frenzied with less than one month of supply and very strong job growth,” noted Kate Seabaugh, a senior manager of research at John Burns, in her report. But affordability issues have caused the market to slow substantially.
Listings in metro Denver spent an average of 23 days on the market in June, which is about a fifth longer than they did last year.
Schafer noted that sales prices in June were at 99.41 percent of listing prices. While sellers aren’t getting a premium above list price like they used to, they have adjusted expectations and aren’t missing the mark widely on their initial prices.
For the first half of 2019, home and condo sales in metro Denver are down 2.8 percent compared to the same period a year ago. The number of active listings is up 28 percent and median prices are up 0.72 percent, according to the DMAR report.
