The Get Home Denver Team

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News is spreading and everyone is starting to jump on the bandwagon. As reported today,

“While the new home industry wrapped up 2007 on a weak note, there are indications that the bottom of this housing cycle may occur in the next few months,” said Mike Inselmann, president of Houston-based Metrostudy, a national housing tracking and consulting company.
“Builders are steadily whittling down excess inventories, interest rates have recently declined again to near-historic lows, and there is sentiment that housing prices will stabilize by mid-year,” he added in a statement.
“Home prices in many markets are as low today as they are likely to be for the next decade,” he said. “And with the low interest rates and low prices, housing affordability is improving in many areas of the country.”
Despite the lengthy housing correction, job growth continues to illustrate the underlying strength of the local economy, said John Covert, director of Metrostudy’s Denver division.
According to the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment, the Denver-Aurora-Boulder MSA added 22,000 jobs during 2007, for an annual growth rate of 1.7 percent.
“Job growth is expected to be about 1.5 percent, which would mean 20,000 new jobs,” Covert said in a statement. “This will help the housing market absorb the high levels of existing home and new home inventories.”
Denver’s unemployment rate remained low at 3.9 percent in December, compared to 4 percent the previous year and compared to the national unemployment rate of 5 percent.
“Denver’s new home market continued to post anemic numbers through 2007, a necessary contraction after the overbuilding of previous years,” Covert said. “After peaking at more than 20,000 annual housing starts in the fourth quarter of 2005, the market began to slow. The contraction is expected to continue until the end of 2008, when housing starts should begin to outpace new home closings, thus indicating the market’s return to growth.”
The Denver metro area recorded 1,611 new home starts (attached and detached) during the fourth quarter of 2007, the lowest number of quarterly starts in seven years.
The annual starts rate declined 36 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006, to 10,135 units at the end of 2007.
Single-family quarterly closings totaled 2,841 units in the fourth quarter, a 32 percent decline compared to the fourth quarter of 2006.
The annual closings rate was 11,826 units, a 33 percent decline compared to the prior year. Annual closings outpaced the number of homes started in the 12 months ending in December 2007 by 1,691 units.
“Although the gap between starts and closings narrowed during the fourth quarter, the current market correction will continue through 2008, as builders grapple with inventories and slow demand,” Covert said. No county in the Denver metro area has been immune to the housing slowdown, Covert said