Buying frenzy slows but home prices remain sky-high in Colorado mountain towns
The number of transactions is waning as the supply of homes for sale declines, but buyers continue to pay record-setting prices for high country homes
The Colorado Sun
Shelby Reardon/Steamboat Pilot & Today
The blistering pace of home sales in Colorado’s mountain communities is slowing. Finally.
After sales volume and prices more than doubled in Colorado’s high country valleys between 2019 and 2021, the number of home sales in six Colorado mountain counties declined through May compared with the same period in 2021. And while prices remain sky-high, there are signs that the buying frenzy that spiked prices to all-time highs may be waning.
Could this be a plateau for a red-hot real estate market that shattered records in Colorado mountain towns in 2021? It’s not looking like the funny-money housing market collapse of 2008, but more of a slow deflation as the number of homes available for sale falls after nearly two years of frantic buying and selling.
Jim Renshaw, the vice-president of Land Title Guarantee Co., which has 50 offices around the state, started seeing a slowdown in deals a couple months ago.
“While the number of transactions are diminishing, the purchase price of the properties is still increasing, especially in those markets where property is finite,” Renshaw said, describing how mountain-town home builders are so backed up that buyers sometimes must wait several years to build a new home on vacant land, which makes existing homes “more desirable and expensive.”
But even with the slowdown in transactions relative to 2021, prices through 2022 are setting records, keeping overall sales volume high.
Read more at ColoradoSun.com.
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