Happy New Year to all! Welcome to the inaugural issue of First American Title’s Boulder and Surrounding Areas Real Estate Stats Report.
That’s a long name that we will surely improve on. Dori Van Lone has asked me for years to produce this report for her…for you. I finally agreed. I’m Kyle Snyder and I’ve been with First American Title for 4.5 years and in the title business for 17. I work in the Longmont market where I have been doing a monthly stats piece since 2008. I was a local real estate appraiser before title stole me away and have always had a passion for stats. I guess that math minor I got years ago is finally coming in handy.
Here are the rules for this game. There are none. This newsletter is not copyrighted, and you may copy/paste these words, the graphs and the stats at will. You may plagiarize as you like, and generally make yourself look good to your clients by using, any or all of this information. If reproducing any of this, good advice is to quote us as your source. The real estate commission frowns on passing something off as your own, but we are surely not the source police. This is written with the Realtor in mind, so adjusting the words to address your clients may be wise at times. We try to report and educate in hopes you can grow your business. Hopefully, you will benefit from this piece and reach out to our First American team to learn about our other great tools to help you grow your business. Have fun with this and always feel free to ask questions and offer constructive criticism.
First off, please familiarize yourself with the maps in the key section. We have defined areas that make sense, but nothing is perfect. What we don’t do is use zip codes…EVER. That’s just a silly and lazy way to go about reporting and that’s not the way we do things here at First Am. The report will always be laid out in this format with a custom graph each month that hopefully enhances the data or current trends. Now let’s take a bite out of this.
December 2021 Boulder Area Real Estate Statistics (.pdf)
I’m going to skip right to the punchline because I can hardly contain myself. Not shown in this report, but I calculated the average sales price of a single-family home in Boulder for 2021. A new world record for Boulder was set at $1,569,332. That is a 22.3% gain over the previous Boulder record of “only” $1,282,978. All I can say is wow! That year-over-year (YoY) increase is one of the highest in the region. At $1.3M last year, who knew local values had so much room to run? Logically there would seem to be a ceiling, but apparently not. If we achieve a small 10% increase in 2022 the average at the end of this year would eclipse $1.7M, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Boulder market tends to grow in spurts, with modest price gains following a year where there are big price gains.
I would never minimize the impact and severity of the recent fire that destroyed so many homes and lives, but this is also a real estate event that we need to consider. My heart and prayers go out to the victims and I know if we all band together we can help them get back on their feet again. And while so many precious memories have been lost, new ones are ready to be created with our help. So, just know this report was designed before the fire and we will look at the impact of these events as they unfold. In honor of this event, we will keep the Superior stats in our report, and we will cheer for every success and milestone we uncover.
The immediate impact of the fire will be felt throughout the region this report covers. Resales home inventory and available rentals were scarce before this event, they will become even more scarce in the coming weeks and months. My guess is that we will see available inventory reduced even further and prices to increase as a result of higher demand and lower supply. It’s basic economics and hopefully it stays there, and that we don’t start to hear reports of price gouging.
You will notice that every single area covered by this report shows a decrease in average days on market, except for Erie. Erie’s increase in days on market of 51.6% to a whopping 47 days isn’t what we’d call an eyebrow raising event. Erie’s single family home market is still positioned well with steadily increasing prices and with about 10% of their total sales volume made up of new construction.
One could argue that having two small markets like Lafayette and Louisville lumped into one larger group would make sense. But don’t make that argument to the residents of either area. Each of these towns takes great pride that they are different than the other. Buyers who are new to the area may not care much and would basically shop both areas if they wanted to be close to Boulder without paying Boulder prices. While Louisville has higher average and median prices, you’ll notice how they act nearly identically. Even with the recent loss of homes in the area I predict they will continue to thrive alongside each other.
The smallest market in this report is our custom-made area called Niwot. Check out the map of the area it covers. It isn’t big and it doesn’t have a ton of yearly sales, but it is the one we get the most requests to cover… so we finally did it. I would guess that over the years will see wild swings in the monthly values. This will be very noticeable at times because one sale of a big Sommerset home can really move an average. December appears to be a typical month, but you can see there was good demand even at these higher price levels and the list to sold average was much higher than last year and the days on market was much lower.
In order to catch a good look at the attached market in southeast Boulder County, we combined the sales in Lafayette, Louisville, Superior and Erie. We felt this was mostly a single trade area when buyers search for a condo. There is good variety of ages, types, and styles. When we pulled this apart to look at them individually, they didn’t tell much of a story since each are so small. This attached group is a significant part of this market and this is the best way we can keep an eye on them.
Lastly, take a quick look at the graph in the middle of page 1. The wide bars show the average yearly sales price in blue for Boulder and orange for Louisville. The gray line is the average price increase from year to year for Boulder and the yellow represents the same for Louisville. In both cases, the prices and the rate of change are increasing in tandem, showing the price growth is regional and pretty even despite the price point difference in the two towns. The only outlier is the decrease in Louisville’s average price in 2019. And really, I wouldn’t call that a decrease if you look at the actual sales. It’s the reason people don’t love using averages… there we just more (about 3x), lower priced homes sold that year, which drags an average down.
Typically, we won’t have such a long article. Lots of introduction stuff this month, thanks for reading! We look forward to hearing your feedback, please send all comments to Dori.
Cheers,
Kyle Snyder and Dori VanLone