Denver Housing Market Remains Slow

The Denver housing market is continuing to see drops in price growth and bidding wars as potential buyers stall, Redfin reports.

Home prices in the Denver metro area rose just 1.4 percent year over year in May to $425,000, marking the sixth consecutive month of annual home-price growth of less than 5 percent. The trend of tepid price growth comes after more than six straight years of 5 percent-plus growth in the Denver area, one of the hottest markets in recent history. Last May, home prices were up 11 percent year over year; the months that followed marked the start of the cooldown.

In May, 12 percent of offers in the Denver area written by Redfin agents on behalf of their homebuying customers faced a bidding war. That’s down from 20 percent just one month earlier and down from 57 percent in May 2018. Meanwhile, the bidding war rate has recovered in other metros that were hot in mid-2018. Both San Francisco and San Diego have also seen substantial decreases in bidding wars since last May, but the rate has increased since last month.

Even with the stalling price growth and falling bidding war rate, home sales in Denver were up 5.6 percent year over year in May, the fourth month in a row of rising sales. But when you consider that supply was up 32.1 percent for the same time period, the ninth straight month of double-digit increases, you can see that a lot of homes are lingering on the market.

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