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In the Denver-metro area, the real estate news never stops, so here we go with our third edition.
Rent, but not the musical
This month brought good news for consumers in the market for new digs: Rent increases for homes are beginning to slow. The supply of rental units — both homes and apartments — is creeping up, thus tamping down what landlords are able to charge a month.
If you’re not wanting to rent a home but rather like luxury apartment living, you are in luck.
Swanky, high-end apartments make up a third of all units in Denver. The percentage of high-end units being built, however, has begun to decline but that doesn’t mean developers are going to stop producing the luxury units. Denver officials had begun to worry about too many luxury apartments on the market without a balance of workforce units.
Around the state, even though rents are lower in rural areas, so are economic opportunities, making it difficult for people to easily meet their housing costs.
Beefy prices call for more bacon
First, there was turkey talk. And now beef and bacon. Maybe we should be called On The Chopping Block. But if you’re hunting for a typical home in the Denver-metro area (the median price a beefy $450,100), you’ll need to be bring home at least $91,000 in salary. The salary is the bacon, for those of you not up on your idioms. The mortgage site HSH.com did a study and found that Denver’s salary requirements for housing at the ninth most out of 50 large metro areas included in the survey.
New stores are in fashion
Spanish fast-fashion clothing brand Zara opened its first Colorado store in Cherry Creek mall this month just in time for the holidays. The store will be “green,” using 20 percent less energy and 40 percent less water than a standard retail store. The opening isn’t the only change in store for the shopping center.
The big fish got off the hook
It’s a whale of a story. Twenty cities, whittled down from 238 original applicants, spent 14 months courting one of the largest corporations in the world for its second headquarters. It would have meant 50,000 high-paying jobs and billions in tax revenue for the winning city. By now, you know Denver was one of the 20 finalists and lost out to two locations on the East Coast. Three of our reporters took a deep dive into the process to discover what Denver learned.
Even though the region didn’t get HQ2, that doesn’t mean Amazon’s presence isn’t growing here.
Office space, but not the movie
WeWork, a co-working company that first entered the Denver commercial real estate scene in 2016, will soon be the No. 1 office space holder in the metro area. WeWork will be moving into several central Denver locations by late 2020, including the future corporate home of HomeAdvisor. And though WeWork will most likely surpass DaVita as the big cheese in office space, there will still be plenty to go around. Businesses will move into more than a million square feet of downtown office space every year between now and 2021, according to projections from international real estate advisory firm Newmark Knight Frank.
Dive goes down
Another longtime watering hole in downtown Denver may be shuttered. Shelby’s Bar & Grill, a dive once named to Esquire magazine’s “18 Best Bars in America,” could face the wrecking ball and be replaced with luxury condos.
ICYMI
- Sky-high praise: Denver International Airport was ranked the No. 1 large airport in the U.S. by Wall Street Journal.
- Denver’s Urban Land Conservancy, with help from $25 million from FirstBank, has a new tool to help expand affordable housing and affordable commercial space in Denver.
Get in Touch
If you see something that’s cause for a question or have a comment, thought or suggestion, email me at [email protected] or tweet me @bigd2626.
