Welcome to the inaugural monthly stats edition of “Houze” the Market brought to you by your First American Title – Northern Colorado Team.
This newsletter is not copyrighted, and you are welcome to reproduce the information as you please. The real estate commission prefers that you quote the source. This is written with the Realtor in mind. We try to report and educate so you can grow your business. Hopefully, you will see the benefit of this monthly piece and reach out to our First American team to find out what other great tools we have to help you grow your business. Have fun with this and always feel free to ask questions and offer constructive criticism.
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 is 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 American. 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 Northern Colorado Real Estate Stats (.pdf)
Northern Colorado is a little different than many other areas of the state in that it’s growing rapidly. The growth in new home construction lends itself to more opportunities for people to move up and it certainly increases the turnover rate of older homes. The only area covered in this report that had a drop in sales volume from 2020 to 2021 was Loveland. Fort Collins and Greeley saw mild growth in single family home sales and tremendous sales growth in attached sales. The secondary markets surely held their own in overall home sales. This trend should continue for the next several years since there are several new subdivisions coming online in addition to all those currently in growth mode.
It’ll be Spring soon…
Nationally, in 2021, home prices rose 16%. Home prices in Northern Colorado are growing at quite a higher pace. We all know that’s it’s because Northern Colorado is awesome. When I was a kid there probably weren’t a total of 2,300 homes in Windsor, Timnath, Severance and Highland Meadows… now there is turnover of that many homes. This is staggering growth that has been predicted for several years and it’s very much happening now.
In Fort Collins, the December 2021 average sales price for a single-family home was $632,963. That was just for the month of December, where the average sold price was 102% of asking. The overall average sales price of a single-family home for the entire year was about $60k less at $573,387. We’ve seen this end-of-year phenomenon in many areas, but only over the past few years. Having done this for quite some time, it’s my opinion that buyers get desperate to get into a home before the holidays and/or before the snow flies, so they end up paying a little higher price because inventory has already started to wind down for the year. The same thing occurred in Loveland, Greeley.
The increase in the number of attached homes sold in Fort Collins last year is a staggering increase. Most casual observers would attribute this to new construction. A deeper dive into those sales show that only about 155 of the 345-unit increase were new construction. New construction can spur move up opportunities and I believe that’s exactly what happened.
Single-family homes sales in Loveland suffered from what other front range cities have seen, lack of inventory has affected the number of monthly and yearly homes sales, this despite healthy new construction, particularly in the attached market. The days on market for Loveland attached homes should be of zero concern to anyone reading this report. Of the 320 attached sales, 80 of them were new construction that were listed on the market for hundreds of days. If those are removed from the calculation, all resale attached sales average 33 days on market, falling in line with all other areas.
Greeley showed unusual strength in December with higher sales in both single family and attached homes compared to December 2020. They remain the most affordable place to live in Northern Colorado despite solid average price increases. Their days on market and sold vs asking price show strong demand. This demand will continue in 2022 as affordability will be a primary driver of buyers in the coming years as Loveland, Fort Collins, and the smaller towns continue their push over $500,000 and $600,000. Not only will those higher prices scare away some buyers. Any rise in interest rates will make those prices unreachable for entry level buyers, making Greeley even more attractive.
Here is an easy prediction I’ll make for 2022. Fort Collins only needs and average price increase of 4.6% to reach an average sales price of $600,000. It’ll happen.
Take a quick look at the graph in the middle of page 1. The wide bars show the average yearly sales price in red for Fort Collins and green for Loveland. The purple line is the average price increase from year to year for Fort Collins and the blue represents the same for Loveland. In both cases, the prices and the rate of change are increasing in tandem, showing the price growth is regional and fairly even despite the price point difference in the two towns.
Oh, last thing. And I like to drop this because it gets so many eye rolls. Any idea what the average price of a single-family home was in Boulder last year? $1,569,332. Makes you feel kind of lucky you live where you do.
Kyle Snyder
First American Title